The transactional amendment that PSOE, Junts and ERC have agreed to definitively approve the proposed amnesty law for all those accused of the process excludes from the grace measure “acts that, due to their purpose, can be classified as terrorism, according to the 2017 European directive,” and in turn “have intentionally caused serious violations of human rights regulated in articles 2 and 3 of the Convention.” European Court of Human Rights”, which refer to the right to life and the prohibition of torture, respectively.
This directive classifies “as terrorist crimes when they are committed with one of these purposes: “a) attacks on the life of a person that may result in death; b) attacks against the physical integrity of a person; c) kidnapping or taking hostages; d) massive destruction of state or public facilities, transportation systems, infrastructure, including computer systems, fixed platforms located on the continental shelf, public places or private properties, which may endanger human lives or cause great economic damage; e) the illicit seizure of aircraft and ships or other means of collective transport or goods; f) the manufacture, possession, acquisition, transportation, supply or use of explosives or firearms, including chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, as well as the research and development of chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons; g) the release of dangerous substances, or the causing of fires, floods or explosions whose effect is to endanger human lives; h) the disturbance or interruption of the supply of water, electricity or other basic natural resources whose effect is to endanger human lives.”
The agreed text, which will be approved tomorrow in the Justice Commission of Congress, is similar to the one that the seven Junts deputies rejected a little over a month ago, although references to the Spanish Penal Code have now been eliminated in the chapter dedicated to terrorism. that cannot be amnestied.
The negotiators emphasize that the agreement reached is “in line with the endorsement of the Venice Commission, it reinforces the full agreement of the norm with the Constitution, European law and international jurisprudence, in order to make it an impeccable norm.” Also excluded from the amnesty are “the crimes of torture, treason, as well as corruption that involves personal enrichment.” The bill also rejects amnesty for any crime “that has resulted in a violation of the principles of the United Nations Charter.”
The agreed wording should facilitate, according to its drafters, the inclusion in the amnesty of all people involved in the independence process. To this end, the scope of application is extended, bringing it forward to November 2011, as Junts claimed so that all claims related to the Court of Auditors are also covered (the text that the independentists rejected in January covered a time period that began on 1 January 2012 and ended on November 13, 2023).
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The new text will pass the filter of the Justice Commission this Thursday to be approved next week in the plenary session of Congress and, then, by the Senate, over the next two months. The Government hopes that with the approval of the law, “a stage that has conditioned political life in Catalonia and all of Spain for too long” can be definitively closed.
Regarding the administrative sphere, in addition, the return of the imposed sanctions is still excluded, although there will be exceptions with those less serious imposed in matters of citizen security, “which may be returned by the administration that imposed them if there are reasons of proportionality.”
The three signatory groups of the agreement, which announced it at eight in the afternoon, but without revealing the formula reached, have decided to withdraw the rest of the amendments they had presented to the text.
A complex procedure
The amnesty law proposal, registered by the socialist group on November 24, was amended on January 30 for its final approval in plenary, eliminating the reference to the fact that terrorism crimes would be amnestiable without a final sentence. However, the Junts parliamentary group, which demanded amnesty in exchange for supporting the investiture of the socialist Pedro Sánchez, with its seven deputies rejected the final text of the bill, which was returned to the Justice Commission.
Junts then presented 11 amendments which, in turn, were rejected in plenary session with votes against, among others, from PSOE and Sumar. The two coalition parties in the Government have defended that the text that was registered in Congress was “fully constitutional” and the one that will come out of the Cortes will be “equally constitutional.” However, in the first procedure they had to eliminate the reference that terrorist crimes that had not yet had a final sentence would be amnestiable, due to doubts about their constitutionality. That elimination filled Junts with doubts, whose votes are decisive for the initiative to go ahead.
Among the amendments presented by Junts, those referring to article 2 of the bill stood out, which regulates crimes that cannot be granted amnesty. The text agreed between all the groups of the investiture bloc, except Junts, excluded terrorism crimes from the amnesty as long as, “manifestly and with direct intention, they have caused serious violations of human rights, particularly those provided for in the Article 2 and 3 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and international humanitarian law.
Two days before the vote on this text, Judge Manuel García-Castellón, who has been investigating the summary on the violent protests of the Democratic Tsunami movement for more than four years, responded to an appeal from one of those affected and clarified in an order that was investigating a crime of terrorism included in the area that, according to the bill, could not be amnestied.
Junts alleged two reasons to defend the elimination of this section on terrorist crimes: “There is no jurisprudential obligation that requires excluding from the amnesty acts classified as terrorist crimes (…) and, furthermore, this would avoid “the improper use made of the Penal Code and the instruments of the State to persecute the Catalan independentists.” “As soon as the proposed amnesty law was made public, processes that were assumed to be aimed at dismissal were reactivated,” recalled the amendment in relation to the Tsunami Democràtic summary, where Judge García Castellón tried four years after the investigation was opened —and has now achieved it in the Supreme Court—that former president Carles Puigdemont be charged with a crime of terrorism.
The Catalan separatists fear that, after the opening of a criminal case for terrorism in the Supreme Court against Puigdemont, who has fled from justice since 2017, the courts will refuse to apply the future amnesty law, designed to benefit all those prosecuted or convicted of the illegal independence challenges—both the so-called participatory consultation of 2014 and the 2017 referendum. The Supreme Court, against the opinion of the Prosecutor’s Office of the National Court and the deputy prosecutor of the Supreme Court itself, decided to support the reasoned statement sent by Judge García-Castellón to investigate whether Puigdemont has committed a crime of terrorism as an alleged leader of the protest movements that took place in Barcelona after the sentence that sentenced nine independence leaders to prison. “Throughout the entire period covered by the bill,” Junts pointed out in its amendment, “there is no act that can be classified as a crime of terrorism, however, we find that, at least, there are two procedures ( that of Tsunami Democràtic and that of the Committees for the Defense of the Republic) in which, arbitrarily and unjustifiably, Catalan independentists are investigated and persecuted for acts that would not be classifiable as such but that are being classified.”
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