The PSOE managed to push through yesterday with its parliamentary partners, also together, the eight partial amendments to the Amnesty law proposal that it had registered as a block with Sumar, Esquerra, EH Bildu and BNG. The initiatives that they had presented, each on their own, twelve post-convergents and four republicans, remain in the air. They will be debated next week in the Justice Committee and may come alive to the plenary session of the Congress of Deputies, where the criminal oblivion will be given the go-ahead at the end of January.
A first meeting of the Justice committee was held yesterday, and ERC and Bildu abstained from one of the amendments they had initialed in the previous step, although it went ahead with 18 votes to 17 against. This is an amendment that deals with the effects of criminal responsibility and the immediate release of all those granted amnesty who were in prison and states that the application of the amnesty is the competence of the court that is seeing at that time the case The other seven that were validated reached 20 votes in favor and 17 against, so they have already been included in the initial text.
So, Carles Puigdemont's party has supported the eight amendments agreed by the other groups, although it avoided stamping its signature a few days ago. On Tuesday, when the new text is debated in the Justice committee, the rejected amendments can be kept alive to try to include them before the plenary session.
The post-convergents explained that yesterday's day was focused on "advancing the technical adjustments" that they did have a consensus on.
Sources from Junts praised the "not at all rough" atmosphere of the commission and underlined, in addition, the need for "no one to be left out of the application" of the Amnesty law. That is why they were in favor of continuing to work and negotiate to "try to include some aspects" of their proposals that were left out of the first choice yesterday.
In this way, the amendment that JxCat and ERC separately registered to try to shield those accused of the crime of terrorism has for now been rejected by the Socialists, who already warned at the outset that they considered the original text it was already of "enormous solidity" and that they did not plan to go further.
The independentists, with their amendment, wanted to guarantee that those accused of terrorism - the cause of the Democratic Tsunami with Puigdemont and Marta Rovira at the head and the members of the Committees for the Defense of the Republic (CDR) arrested in the Judes operation, who are waiting judgment – are also included in the law.
ERC, for its part, also took issue yesterday with the fact that the amendments it presented alone have not been incorporated into the report. Marta Vilalta, spokeswoman and deputy general secretary of the Republicans, recalled that the text of the law already includes cases of terrorism that, as she said, would be amnestied. He explained that what they are trying to do is "improve the law" in order to have "more legal certainty" and not allow for appeals once approved.
The report of the lawyers of the Justice Commission that raised doubts about the constitutionality of the law was also rejected and only technical points were admitted.
