The Diplomat
The Popular Parliamentary Group (PP) has tabled a non-legislative proposal (PNL) and a series of questions in Congress, in which it calls on the Government to monitor whether the human rights of Ernesto Quintero, an opponent of Nicolás Maduro’s regime, who was extradited yesterday to Venezuela, are being respected, according to PP sources.
Quintero had been held for more than a year in provisional detention in Madrid’s Soto del Real prison after being arrested in Madrid on 10 February 2021, after both the Spanish government and the Audiencia Nacional accepted the extradition request of the Venezuelan authorities, who accuse him of being part of the leadership of a currency exchange agency that allegedly swindled 40 million dollars.
Ernesto Quintero has always declared his innocence and argued that he was the target of political persecution by the Venezuelan attorney general against the brokerage firms and their workers”, because he considered them to be “akin to a capitalist ideology”, opposed to the regime and “persecuted” by it.
The PP, which has always expressed its support for the man now extradited, recalls in its parliamentary initiatives that on 26 May last, the plenary session of the Congress of Deputies approved a non-legislative motion calling for the non-extradition of Ernesto Quintero and Rolando Figueroa.
In the presentation of a new PNL, signed by the spokesperson of the Popular Group, Cuca Gamarras and the deputies Valentina Martínez, Pablo Hispán and Belén Hoyo, the Popular Group stresses that Quintero has not been tried either in Spain or in Venezuela and that in that Latin American country, the process presents “numerous irregularities”.
For this reason, the PNL urges ‘the Spanish Embassy in Venezuela to demand from the Maduro regime scrupulous respect for the detainees and for due process in view of the lack of effective and independent justice and the proliferation of mistreatment in prisons, thus preventing the Spanish Government from becoming an accomplice in the mistreatment of detainees’.
At the same time, the deputies Martínez, Hispán and Hoyo, have presented a series of questions to the Government, after stressing that Venezuela does not comply with Human Rights. Thus, they ask if the Embassy in Caracas carries out regular reports on the general state of prisons in Venezuela and if these reports have been provided to the judges in charge of deciding on extraditions.
In addition, they want to know, specifically, “how the Government is going to guarantee that Venezuela complies with human rights and guarantees a fair judicial process for Ernesto Quintero, who is a Spanish resident and whose wife and children are still in Spain”.
