The Diplomat
PSOE MEPs yesterday voted in favour of the European Parliament’s Petitions Committee report calling for ETA to be tried for crimes against humanity, even though they had tried to remove this element from the final text during the amendment process.
The report thus went ahead in the vote in the committee, with the support of PP, PSOE, Ciudadanos and Vox. The text takes up the proposals of MEPs who travelled to Spain last November to meet with victims’ groups and members of the judiciary and security forces.
The PSOE MEPs thus changed their position, after the process of amendments that concluded on Wednesday, when they tabled several amendments to, among other things, remove the point that ETA crimes, including those prior to 2004, should be investigated as crimes against humanity.
Socialist sources explained to Europa Press that their opposition was due to the fact that the specific request is not included in the Spanish Constitution and recalled that their representatives participated in the mission and the drafting of the report and had not considered voting against the final text.
In a series of messages on Twitter, Socialist MEP Cristina Maestre, the author of the amendment, said that it was precisely during the Parliament’s mission to Spain that senior representatives of the Audiencia Nacional and the Public Prosecutor’s Office explained to MEPs that “they cannot apply lèse humanité to crimes prior to 2004, which is when it came into force”.
Maestre defended that all parliamentary groups have worked on the report on ETA’s unsolved crimes and denounced the “manipulation of the extreme right”. “In addition to causing pain and indignation, they promote the division of democrats who fight for peace and achieve it,” she said.
The majority of the groups voted in favour of the recommendation to suggest to the competent institutions that they “exhaust the interpretative possibilities of criminal law, including the possible recognition of ETA’s terrorist crimes as crimes against humanity, even before 2004” and rejected the PSOE amendment calling for the deletion of this point.
In its communiqué following the approval of the report, the PP welcomes the fact that the Socialist amendments that “sought to soften the report” did not make it through.
The president of the Petitions Committee, Dolors Montserrat, described the Socialist amendments as “shameful” and insisted that “one cannot be lukewarm or ambiguous in the defence of the memory, dignity, truth and justice of the victims of ETA”.
“No political or power interests can be above the defence of those who have suffered the terror of ETA”, she said.
