Our judges carefully protect the basic rights of police officers as much as they disregard the rights of reds and dissidents accused of anything by security forces.
A police commissioner makes sexist comments, they are revealed and she is punished. Then a court overturns the sanction with strange arguments. This has just happened and is another good example of the general tolerance of our judges towards the excesses of the security forces. The most conservative judges and lawyers say that these are isolated cases, that it is not possible to rule on a specific case and that each case is different. This is what it would indeed look like if the data did not exist. The 14 convictions against Spain for not having investigated police mistreatment. The list of cases of police impunity that human rights organizations publish each year. Search engine results…
Because the data indicates that this is not an isolated case, but a consistent and normalized trend. Any lawyer who has ever handled a case involving alleged police abuse knows this. In fact, anyone searching for convictions and court rulings on police excesses in a legal or news search engine knows: the results, consistent and stubborn, show that complaints are abused even in cases where there are has obvious witnesses, photos or videos. Let sanctions be lifted even in cases where, like this, the public evidence says the exact opposite of what the judges see.
This last case is just an additional example.
Estíbaliz Palma is National Police Commissioner. A few years ago, he attended the dinner organized by his colleagues in honor of a riot policeman injured during the incidents in Barcelona to protest against the conviction of the process and he had to retire because of it. There, a video of the Minister of the Interior was shown for the first time, in which he encouraged the agent and praised his professionalism. Then it was her turn to speak and she made a few patriotic jokes. He said Madrid is a national area, not like Galicia. And he also said that during process It appeared that the police were intent on mistreating the demonstrators when in reality “some of them would like to be raped by a riot policeman.” One of the people present recorded these remarks and, scandalized by their content, then transmitted them to the press.
A scandal was created throughout the country and the police department opened a file. It concluded with a sanction of five days of suspension, the minimum provided for by the regulations. It was understood that he had committed a serious offense with a manifest violation of the obligations inherent to his function and due to the contempt of citizens, causing notable discredit to the police institution.
Although the sanction was the lightest possible, the police appealed and now the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid has overturned it. He first argues that it has not been proven that the commissioner, through her expressions, wanted to denigrate victims of sexual violence. She says she didn’t know her words were being recorded, so she’s not responsible for how much they mattered. As if it wasn’t their actions that mattered, but how they were tested. In fact, even if the exact words had not been recorded, anyone present could have said them and the scandal would be the same. The scandal was not the existence of a recording, but the words he had spoken. But for judges, making fun of raped women in front of forty police officers, if it is not recorded, is like making fun of them.
Furthermore, the judges affirm that during this dinner, the commissioner was not exercising her functions. The truth is that she spoke not only as a police officer, but also as a commissioner. If he had the floor, it was because he was the highest commanding officer among all those present. Furthermore, he delivered his speech following that of the Minister of the Interior. Certainly, if the person sanctioned had been the minister, these same judges would never have said that he was not speaking as a minister, but as a citizen. But he’s not a police officer.
Obviously, in the world of law, everything is debatable. In law schools, lawyers are taught to argue using the laws in force, both from one position and the other. With a little creativity and a little willpower, any judge can motivate virtually anything they want. And in this case, the usual media magistrates have already emerged saying that the court simply wanted to be a guarantee for the official.
And it’s very good that the judges are guarantors. That is, they strictly protect the rights of citizens. The problem is that they are only selective and – coincidentally – they are particularly selective when it comes to judging police officers.
For example, in Spain there are two different standards regarding the presumption of innocence. When a police officer is accused of ill-treatment, our judges believe that the right to the presumption of innocence requires that his guilt be proven beyond doubt. If in a video you see a police officer kicking a person to the ground but there is no evidence that it was precisely that kick and not another that caused the injuries, then the officer is not condemned. If a citizen gets out of a police car with a broken nose, when there is no proof that he did not break it himself despite the police, then the police officers who transported him will not are not the subject of an investigation. If a detained citizen appears covered in bruises in his cell, but there is no evidence that it was the police and that it was not an accident, then no investigation is carried out.
This is a strict way of understanding that no one is guilty unless the opposite is very reliably proven.
The problem is that this standard which guarantees and defends rights does not apply in all cases. If a protester is charged six years after kicking a police officer during a demonstration, even in the absence of video, evidence or a medical certificate, judges find that the police officer’s confusing statement is enough to make him guilty. condemn, especially if after the time the guy is a left-wing MP. If six boys from Zaragoza are accused of violently protesting against Vox and the police, our judges see no problem in sentencing them to six years in prison without more evidence than the statements of a few officers who claim it was them.
All these examples are real cases. Our judges carefully protect the basic rights of police officers as much as they disregard the rights of reds and dissidents accused of anything by security forces. They have a blatant bias that allows them to exonerate law enforcement officers of anything and convict citizens who confront them of anything.
This has been going on for years and no one is doing anything. And in this system of impunity against excesses, some Madrid judges now affirm that saying that Catalan separatists died following the rape of a riot police officer is not grounds for sanction. Given the precedents, it is easy to imagine that if the person who had uttered this sentence was a Catalan official and had said that the police would like to be raped by a handsome separatist, these same judges would have considered the sanction fully justified.
Just because. Because Spanish justice has entered a dangerous drift in which it uses the law to persecute those who do not think like our conservative magistrates. Our magistrates hide less every day when they manipulate the laws and facts so that police excesses remain unpunished, but those of the tojos and the separatists are harshly punished. They have lost their sense of impartiality to such an extent that one day we will read Supreme Court judges saying that what the separatists need is for a judge to rape them. As if, figuratively speaking, every day wasn’t already happening.
