Barcelona’s hate crimes prosecution has appealed the sentence that gave neo-Nazi Pedro Varela a minimum term. As elDiario.es learned, the prosecutor asks the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) to increase the 18-month sentence imposed on the ultras in first instance to eight years in prison and, in particular, to order the closure definitive decision of the bookstore and publishing house belonging to the neo-Nazis, which the Barcelona court rejected.
The sentence of the Barcelona court left behind a thorough investigation carried out by the Mossos d’Esquadra and the prosecution by acquitting all the accused except Varela and condemning the famous neo-Nazi (who, a few hours before the trial, had attended a Vox rally) to a prison sentence of only one and a half years in prison, compared to the 12 demanded by the public prosecutor.
Born in Barcelona in 1957, Varela was in his youth one of the disciples of León Degrelle, a Belgian SS officer to whom Franco gave asylum in Spain. In 1978, Varela became president of CEDADE, the largest Nazi propaganda organization and source of much of the Spanish far right until its dissolution in 1993. He racked up up to three convictions for spreading the neo-Nazi ideology.
The case represented the fourth trial against Pedro Varela and the legal tool to close once and for all the Europa bookstore and the Ojeda publishing house, owned by this veteran of the neo-Nazi movement and transformed into two of the epicenters of ultra propaganda in Barcelona. : there, books like “Mein Kampf” were sold and leaders of international supremacy or the Ku Klux Klan came to give lectures.
The Barcelona court, however, rejected the permanent closure of Varela’s businesses, as well as the ban on publishing books, and only ordered the destruction of copies of neo-Nazi books seized in 2016, when the investigating judge in the case has decreed the preventive closure of the establishment.
The refusal to permanently close the neo-Nazi bookstore and publishing house was based on the fact that the court had not convicted Varela of illicit association. The judges only punished the neo-Nazi with 18 months in prison for the crime of inciting hatred for Varela’s publishing, sale and distribution of Nazi books, which the court noted “saved works openly and grossly discriminatory against Jews. ” “.
The books as well as the conferences and activities of the Europa bookstore were aimed at “the defense and praise at all costs of several of its authors, such as Adolf Hiter and Rudolf Hess”, adds the judgment. However, the closure of the businesses could only be a consequence of a conviction for illicit association and not for incitement to hatred, the court ruled.
In an educational argument, prosecutor Marta Gloria López Catalá compares the case of establishments and businesses in Varela with the seizure of boats dedicated to drug trafficking. If the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court has supported the definitive seizure of vehicles used to transport narcotics, it must also proceed in the same way with the vehicles (in this case, the bookstore and the publishing house) through which Varela spread hate speech. . for which he was convicted, reasons the prosecutor.
“The spaces of the Europa and Ediciones Ojeda bookstore and its trademark registered in the patent register are the instruments by which the criminal acts were committed,” recalls the prosecutor, who considers it possible that its closure is a consequence of a conviction for incitement hate. For this reason, the appeal does not include a request for conviction for illicit association, but rather examines the legal relevance of the closure in the sole offense for which he was convicted in the first instance.
In addition to the closure of the premises, the prosecution requests in its appeal the closure of the websites of the bookstore and the publishing house, as well as its Facebook page and the money seized from a bank account of Varela, which the court of Barcelona was also saved from its final destruction.
