The unease generated in the PP and other parties by the reform validating ETA prisoners’ sentences served in another country – which seems likely to move forward after the PP and Vox voted in favor at different stages of the Congress along with the entire parliamentary spectrum – has set in motion the legal machinery at Génova 13, the central headquarters of the Popular Party, to try to stop this future norm. The reform was intended to be carried out as an amendment incorporated by Sumar to an organic law project being debated in the Senate, where the PP has an absolute majority. However, due to the alleged error now claimed by the members of the PP and Vox, they did not present any vetoes or amendments to the initiative when it entered the Upper House. If the matter were to reach the plenary session, it would continue on its course and end up in the BOE, even if the PP were to vote against it without having to return to the Congress. The PP seeks solutions to this predicament and will request that the Senate Table postpone the matter from the agenda for another session on Tuesday, something that can be requested by a single group, and later the Government withdraw the proposal.
The legislative initiative was unanimously approved in the plenary of the Congress on September 18, after passing with the same total consensus in the drafting and the Justice commission, and arrived at the Senate with an urgent character. That is, the Upper House has a maximum of 20 days for its processing, until the 14th of this month. After El Confidencial published on Monday the news that the measure could benefit many prisoners, some of them terrorists, the PP has spent the entire day looking for ways to urgently halt its processing. As announced by the national spokesperson of the PP, Borja Sémper, in a press conference, the party was going to try to do “everything possible” to reverse the situation. At the end of the day, they decided to ask the Senate Table to withdraw its vote from the agenda at the last minute of a plenary session that starts on Tuesday at 10:00 in the Upper House. The Board of Spokespersons will meet at 9:00, and the Table, half an hour later. It seems likely that this solution will be successful.
The PP is not the only party taking action to mitigate the controversy after it was revealed that they voted in favor of the controversial amendment, as did the entire Congress, and their deputy in that commission, José Manuel Velasco, barely intervened in its discussion and did not mention any benefit for the convicted terrorists in that situation. Neither did the representative of Vox in that session. After the news was published, the socialist Félix Bolaños defended the parliamentary process as “completely peaceful,” and the spokesperson of Sumar and leader of the PCE, Enrique Santiago, who assumed the content and background of the amendment, admitted that he knew what it could imply. Santiago defended in the Congress that the transposition of a European directive aimed to end “the anomaly that a Belgian prisoner or any other EU country prisoner could serve time and have it counted in Spain, while the same could not happen for a Spanish, a Murcian, or Basque person who had partly served that sentence as with some ETA terrorists who have spent years in French prisons.” Santiago considers this difference as an unjust and indefensible discrimination and related the barrage of criticism that arose from all the congresspeople’s actions to an “offensive against the Citizen Security Law,” or gag law, by the PP and Vox for having made some changes in it with EH Bildu. Sumar already registered a Legislative Proposal in 2021 that was not discussed at that time. PP deputy José Manuel Velasco did not appear, the parliamentary leadership of the PSOE made no comment, and no further explanations were given from the Government, the Secretariat of Relations with the Courts, the Ministry of Justice, or the Ministry of the Interior. They simply stated that the proposal aimed to “complete, update, and improve the transposition of a European Directive (2019/884) into our legal system, as well as improve the application of a European Framework Decision (2009/315/JAI), which was carried out at the time through Organic Law 7/2014, and now being reformed for reasons of legal certainty and in light of its application during these years.”
The Government and the PSOE argue that these corrections had the endorsement of the Council of State and followed the criteria of a preliminary question submitted on January 3, 2024, by the Spanish National Court to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). This question inquired about the absence in Spanish legislation of “possible corrective measures to avoid the lack of proportionality of sentences when there are concurrent foreign judgments.” Other sources consulted assure that this directive does not order or compel the counting of sentences served in other countries, although that is its philosophy, and there have been heated debates on the matter, even in the Spanish Supreme Court, which endorsed in 2015 the decision of the Mariano Rajoy Government in 2014 to exclude this possibility for those convicted of terrorism before March 2010, which was when the last attack was recorded before the band communicated its dissolution. The PP and Vox expressed surprise on Monday for having voted several times in favor of what their parliamentarians did in the Congress and blamed the Government for deceit. The PP will now try to erase that point from the Senate Table on Tuesday, already set, which is highly unusual, and hopes to expose the PSOE members there with their votes. There are four PP members and three PSOE members on the Table. They also demand the Government to withdraw the proposal, as it has the power to do so. “If the Government does not withdraw this text, we will seek any legal or parliamentary alternative that can protect this country from the indecency that would result from reducing sentences for ETA terrorists through parliamentary maneuvers. The PSOE is the only party capable of stopping this absurdity,” say official sources of the PP. They also inform that the party leader, Alberto Núñez Feijoo, called the president of the AVT, the Association of Victims of Terrorism, to personally apologize for what happened.
In parallel, the Popular Party has summoned all 145 senators of the parliamentary group to attend the Senate without exception on Tuesday. An instruction that they do not usually give, explain sources from the PP in the Senate, who do not understand how their colleagues in the Congress could overlook the amendment incorporated by Sumar.
