First came the politicians and now the police. The officers under investigation in Barcelona for the October 1, 2017 charges at several schools in the Catalan capital have started asking the judge to grant them amnesty. In a letter, put forward by EFE and accessed by elDiario.es, nine of the 45 accused police officers request amnesty to “alleviate” their procedural situation.
The law of criminal oblivion of the trial seeks to erase the lawsuits that have saturated Catalan politics in recent years. The rule, which aims to be global in scope, includes amnesty for both the preparations for the 1-O referendum carried out by the independents and the police actions to prevent it, as well as the charges against voters in the consultation.
Barcelona judge Francisco Miralles, who investigated the case on charges of 1-O, must now study the application of the amnesty to the officers. On paper, the law includes all charges investigated in Barcelona, as it only excludes from the amnesty torture or degrading treatment that exceeds a “minimum threshold of severity” in accordance with European regulations.
The officers investigated in Barcelona have multiple lawyers, ranging from private lawyers to union lawyers or the public prosecutor's office, given their status as public officials. The first to ask for amnesty was lawyer Javier Aranda, who represents nine officers who acted at six different schools in Barcelona on October 1.
In their letter, the officers state that “under no circumstances” can they be left out of the amnesty, as their use of violence against voters on 1-O did not result in degrading treatment or torture. In addition, the police claim that they are accused “merely of photographs, without proving their authorship, or of the use of force in its minimal form, of more than questionable illegality, no longer criminal but even administrative.”
Like the rest of the judges called to apply the rule, the magistrate will first seek the advice of the Public Prosecution Service and the rest of the parties to the case, as specified by law, before deciding whether certain officers should be excluded from the rule. . If amnesty is granted to the 45 officers under investigation, it is expected that some victims of the indictment will appeal to try to exclude more officers from the amnesty.
The Irídia Human Rights Center, which represents several people injured on October 1, has already announced that it will oppose amnesty for the officers. In their opinion, the officers treated the officers inhumanely or degradingly and therefore they should not be granted amnesty.
It will be the Barcelona Court, and not the judge, that will have to decide whether amnesty should be granted to four other officers accused of blinding an independentist with a rubber bullet on October 1. This case seems more difficult to fall under the amnesty because the rule expressly excludes intentional acts that caused the loss of a member, even if The Public Prosecution Service has already requested that the officers not be tried because, it claims, they were following orders from their superiors.