Judge Grants Amnesty To 46 Officers Investigated For The 1-O Charges In Barcelona

The magistrate follows the criteria of the Prosecutor’s Office and exonerates all the uniformed officers and rules out the possibility of degrading treatment excluded from the criminal law of the process

On the other hand, some of the injured and popular accusations made by the Irídia centre, Òmnium Cultural and the ANC demanded that some police officers be excluded, considering that their actions against voters could fit into a crime of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment, two cases excluded from the amnesty law.

The judge granted amnesty to all 46 agents investigated in the macro-case, considering that the beatings, hair pulling, flying kicks, blows and  even the uniformed officer who threw  a voter down the stairs do not exceed the “minimum threshold of seriousness” that marks their exclusion from the law.

“The actions investigated were of short individual duration, framed within a defined police objective [to prevent the referendum, as ordered by the TSJC] and did not continue once the referendum was achieved,” argues the magistrate. In a ruling, the judge also explains that the charges “did not extend in time beyond the actual police manoeuvre of entering and leaving the various polling stations.”

The judge made the decision after having investigated the case and inquired into the chain of command in the PP’s Interior Ministry during the 1-O referendum , in what is surely the most exhaustive recent investigation of a police intervention. The case had been ready for trial for years, but the successive requests by the prosecution to charge more officers postponed the end of the investigation.

The amnesty law, designed to leave the maximum possible amount of conduct unpunished (both pro-independence and police actions against the referendum) continues to be applied normally by the majority of judicial bodies in Catalonia, while only the Supreme Court has refused to put the law into practice with Carles Puigdemont and the rest of the former ministers.

On Tuesday, the appeals section of the Civil and Criminal Chamber of the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) was the first court in Spain to apply the amnesty to a total of 18 people, 16 of them protesters convicted of rioting and assaulting police officers during the procés protests . The other two were the former Minister of the Interior and the bodyguard convicted of providing an escort to Carles Puigdemont in Belgium. 

With the 46 National Police officers exonerated, 64 people have now been amnestied out of a total of 486 potential beneficiaries of the criminal law of the procés, according to the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s calculations. 

In the case of the police officers investigated for the charges and injuries to voters on 1-O, the wording of the law left them all within the amnesty. The law only excluded the most serious police actions, which could be considered torture or degrading treatment, or those that would have led to the loss of organs, such as the case of the referendum voter whose eye was blown out by a rubber bullet from the National Police. The body in charge of deciding on the amnesty in this case will be the Barcelona Court and not the 7th Court of Instruction of Barcelona, ​​which has granted amnesty to the other 46 uniformed officers under investigation.

The judge’s decision can be appealed before the Barcelona Court. In a statement, Irídia, Òmnium and the ANC announced that they will appeal, considering that the acts carried out by the police exceed the “minimum threshold of seriousness” that, in accordance with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), is set by law to exclude police action from the amnesty.

According to the three entities, the amnesty law “cannot in any case benefit those responsible for police violence”, and charges are excluded from the law “because they may represent crimes of torture or degrading treatment”.

The prosecution, however, had asked for amnesty for the police officers, concluding that their actions were not serious enough to be excluded from the law, because they were not seeking to humiliate or incite fear among voters.