The controversy surrounding the lists of EH Bildu in the face of Sunday’s elections resurfaces, now after a complaint from Dignity and Justice. This association has challenged the candidacy of the Abertzale coalition in Astigarraga before the San Sebastián Electoral Board and has requested its annulment. The reason is that on this electoral sheet appears, as number 10, Sara Majarenas, arrested in 2005 and sentenced in 2007 for integration into a terrorist organization, forgery of documents and illegal possession of weapons for 13 years and 2 months. This person would have served her sentence in full, although not her disqualification from public office, according to the Dignity and Justice complaint.
The association chaired by Daniel Portero has denounced that Majarenas entered prison in February 2005 and was released in April 2018, after having served a sentence of 13 years and 2 months in prison. However, they emphasize that the sentence establishes that “the main penalty of absolute disqualification was imposed for a period of 10 years longer than the prison sentence imposed”, so that this disqualification would extend for a decade from the moment he was released from prison. The limit would therefore be 2028.
Faced with this situation, Dignity and Justice has requested in a letter, which has also been sent to the Gipuzkoa Electoral Board, the National Court’s Executory Service and the Central Electoral Board (JEC), the challenge and annulment of that candidacy for the municipal elections of May 28.
This complaint by Dignidad y Justicia revives the controversy surrounding the EH Bildu lists, which arose after Covite censored that among the 280 lists presented by the nationalist coalition in Euskadi and Navarra there were 44 people convicted for their links to ETA. In some cases, they were sentences related to the Bateragune investigation, the Gestoras pro Amnesty case or the Egin case. In others, it was directly about convictions for terrorism, in seven of the cases with crimes of blood committed between 1978 and 1997.
The Government of Spain, led by Pedro Sánchez, or the PNV expressed their moral reproach for the inclusion of these people on the lists. The PP, on the other hand, went further and used this issue to attack the Executive. “This is the electoral poster of the PSOE,” Cuca Gamarra came to blurt out to Pedro Sánchez, with the photos of the seven exetarras on the ABC cover in his hand.
The seven people with blood crimes on the EH Bildu lists published a statement announcing that they would resign from taking their positions as councilors if elected. In the statement, in which they also addressed the victims, they expressed their “commitment so that neither our words nor our actions ever add the slightest suffering to what already existed.”
This topic continued to kick in until last weekend, with the popular Isabel DÃaz Ayuso flagging the need to outlaw EH Bildu. In recent days, however, she seemed to have disappeared from the campaign.
Dignity and Justice has recalled that it has already denounced the candidacies before the Prosecutor of the National Court and points out that the Public Ministry, in its response, indicated that the historical-criminal sheets of the convicted persons had been collected and that the examination of this documentation did not He appreciated no assumption of ineligibility of those provided for in the electoral law.
Portero has also pointed out that they focused on the fact that there were “anomalies” when recording sentence executions because until 2015 “there was no practice of reflecting in the liquidations the date of extinction of the absolute or special disqualifications imposed in sentence”.
Thus, they point out that the ideal way to see if a sentence of absolute or special disqualification, specifically for a conviction of terrorism, is not to go to the criminal history sheet of the convicted person, “but to the liquidation of the sentence practiced by the Lawyers of the Administration of Justice of the Common Executory Service of the National Court”.
Finally, Dignity and Justice has demanded that the Common Enforcement Service of the National Court be urgently required to liquidate the conviction of “each and every one of the candidates presented by the political entity EH Bildu for the next regional and municipal elections “to verify if someone else incurs in said cause of ineligibility.
