A judge has closed the case against former PP leader Pablo Casado for having said that students who speak Spanish were not allowed to go to the bathroom in the Catalan school. In an order, the judge believes that those words were “misguided and rejectable” but considers that they were protected by freedom of expression and that they were pronounced in a context of “political contention”. The magistrate decided to open an investigation as a result of a complaint filed by the Government of the Generalitat for insults, slander and incitement to hatred.
In his statement before the judge on March 20, Casado assured that he did not contrast those statements and that it was based on press articles and with the aim of denouncing the Government’s language policy. Those news on which the former leader of the PP was supposedly based were from 2008 and another decontextualized one from 1997 on the Basque Country.
Casado pronounced the controversial words in an act of the PP in Galicia in December 2021 in the midst of the controversy over the TSJC ruling that imposed 25% of classes in Spanish. there he said that in Catalonia “there are teachers with instructions not to let children go to the bathroom because they speak Spanish” and that some students are put “stones in their backpacks” for using Spanish at recess.
In his file order, the judge points out that in this procedure the existence of a crime of incitement to hatred or violence has not been sufficiently proven. In his file order, the judge recalls that the Supreme Court rejected the complaint – when Casado lost the status of taxpayer – in a resolution that he now endorses and which established that “in more or less exaggerated expressions, greater moderation may be claimed in the same, but the intervention of criminal law must be measured in a context in which political contention is not forgotten”.
The Generalitat has already advanced that it will appeal the file. Government sources indicate that “freedom of expression is not an absolute right but rather has limits” and consider that “there is no doubt that Casado’s demonstrations have a defamatory and offensive purpose of attacking and questioning the dignity of the Department of Education and those responsible for the educational system in an unnecessary and free way”.
