The Barcelona Public Prosecutor's Office has supported the admission of a complaint for crimes against humanity and torture suffered by a trade unionist during his arrest in the 1970s by police at the Via Laietana Directorate in Barcelona. Now it will be a court in the Catalan capital that has to determine whether to admit the complaint, identify the alleged perpetrators, check if they are still alive and call them to testify for crimes against humanity and torture.
According to the public ministry, the new law of Democratic Memory imposes on the State, from the field of justice, the duty to investigate violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that occurred during the War Civil and the Franco dictatorship.
With this new regulatory framework and the analysis of national and international jurisprudence and international treaties and agreements, the Prosecutor's Office concludes that the inadmissibility of the complaint is not appropriate, but that it is necessary to carry out an investigation of the facts and their context before to adopt a decision on the continuation of the procedure.
In its report, the prosecutor's office recalls the obligation to guarantee not only the right to justice, but also the right to the truth and to reparation for the victims, since they are "principles articulating international human rights law and international humanitarian law , as well as the same law of Democratic Memory".
After the approval of the law in October last year, Òmnium Cultural, Irídia and different memorialist entities filed the first complaint for Francoist crimes. The complaint was filed against six police officers for the torture suffered by unionist Carles Vallejo, who was arrested twice and prosecuted up to three times in connection with his political and union activity.
Vallejo was responsible for the clandestine organization of the CC.OO. in Seat. The Burgos process in 1970, trial against sixteen people, raised a wave of protests seconded in the factories. During those riots, Vallejo was arrested by members of the political-social brigade and was taken to the Via Laietana police station, where he was held for twenty-one days between interrogations and torture before entering prison.
His complaint, endorsed by several associations, was presented after the approval in October of the Democratic Memory law, which reinforces the State's commitment to the search for missing persons from the Civil War and the Franco regime and also opens the door to study possible violations of human rights in the first five years of Spanish democracy.
The law was promoted by the PSOE and Unides Podemos government to repeal the Historical Memory passed in 2007 during the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. One of the most controversial issues in the new law is the possibility of creating a commission to study human rights violations between 1978 and the end of 1983, a time frame that the government extended a year after agreeing an amendment with EH Bildu and that includes from the approval of the Constitution to the beginnings of Felipe González's government.
The proposal of this law provoked criticism from historians of the PSOE, who even signed a manifesto against this law because they consider that it "misrepresents" the "great constitutional pact" of 1978.
