The end of ETA’s prisoner dispersal policy, after 34 years of application, settles a historical claim in the ambit of the nationalist left, while other claims begin to appear in relation to inmates convicted of terrorism. The main one, although not the only one, has to do with the degree progressions of the prisoners, an area in which a tough struggle is expected between the organizations in the field of inmates and the National Court, which in recent months has revoked a dozen progressions to third degree, claiming in almost all cases the lack of an express request for forgiveness and repentance from the victims.
There are currently 165 prisoners convicted of ETA terrorism, far from the more than 530 that existed in 2011, when the band announced the definitive cessation of violence. After the last five transfers to Basque prisons, practically all of these 165 inmates are in prisons in Euskadi and Navarra, with the exception of Natividad Jauregi -with a case pending and awaiting trial in Madrid- and the dozen inmates in French prisons, most of them confined in the Lannemezan prison, near the Basque Country.
After the announcement of the latest approaches to Basque prisons, the support network for the rights of ETA prisoners, Sare, called a press conference in which it concluded the dispersal and showed some letters about what their demands will be in the short term. Sare’s spokesman, the former adviser to the Basque Government and former EA leader Joseba Azkarraga, focused on the third degrees and pointed out that, at this moment, 33 of those 165 incarcerated prisoners are in the third degree, the semi-liberty regime that allows you to leave prison during the day and return for. “110 prisoners should have progressed to that grade,” he denounced.
Azkarraga refers to the number of prisoners who meet one of the fundamental requirements to access the third degree in the case of terrorist crimes: serving half of the sentence (article 36 of the Penal Code). However, legal sources of full solvency indicate that decisions on grade progressions must attend to other general criteria and, especially, to various modifications introduced in 2003.
That year, by means of Law 7/2003, approved in the second legislature of José María Aznar, it was introduced that “in cases of crimes of terrorism or crimes committed within criminal organizations, the prison surveillance judge may order the granting of a third degree when one fifth of the maximum limit of compliance of the sentence imposed remains to be served. In this way, the progression of grade would require the fulfillment of four fifths of the sentence.
This same law also introduced two new sections in the General Penitentiary Organic Law that affect inmates convicted of terrorism. The first of them has to do with the payment of responsibility derived from the crime, while the second refers to the abandonment of terrorist activity and, finally, the “active” collaboration with the authorities to “obtain evidence or identify from other terrorists.”
The legislation states that this collaboration “may be proven by an express declaration of repudiation of their criminal activities and abandonment of violence and an express request for forgiveness from the victims of their crime.” It is at this point where various grade progressions of inmates convicted of ETA violence are clashing with the National Court.
The procedure is the next. The Treatment Boards of the respective prisons propose the respective grade progressions. These Boards depend hierarchically on the Basque Government, which since September 2021 has managed the Prisons jurisdiction and decides whether or not to validate these proposals. Finally, these decisions are subject to judicial control by the Central Penitentiary Surveillance Court of the National Court. This court has revoked a dozen of the 40 grade progressions for ETA prisoners approved by the Treatment Boards, in practically all of the cases alluding to those modifications approved in 2003 and, specifically, to the request for pardon and repentance.
Sare requested, once the end of the dispersion was consummated, that it be “the local courts” who decide on the grade progressions and not the National Court.
The demands of the environment of the ETA prisoners, however, go beyond the third degrees. The new cycle of demands from Sare, an organization that intends to take the demands to a spectrum beyond the nationalist left, and Etxerat, which brings together family members, focuses on various legal changes. The most far-reaching would affect the fundamental modification introduced by Organic Law 7/2003, on full and effective compliance with sentences.
Apart from the aforementioned changes related to grade progressions, the main change that this regulation introduced with regard to ETA prisoners was the reform of article 76 of the Penal Code to “modify the maximum limit of compliance with sentences, raising it to 40 years for cases in which two or more crimes of terrorism are committed.
From Sare and Etxerat they have been denouncing that it is a “concealed life sentence”.
Finally, the other great legal change that the area of ??prisoners and the Abertzale left has on the horizon has to do with the modification of Law 7/2014, on the exchange of criminal records and consideration of criminal court decisions in the European Union. .
This norm was born with the aim of preventing ETA prisoners from taking advantage of a European directive that allowed years of imprisonment already served in another country of the Union to be deducted. In other words, this law prevents, for example, if a prisoner has completed six years in France, that time is not taken into account when calculating the total time in prison.
The Association of Victims of Terrorism (AVT) denounced a year ago that the Government was preparing the modification of this law regarding the calculation of sentences for prisoners convicted of terrorism, a point that the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska he flatly denied.
These demands mark a new cycle in the sphere of the Abertzale left as far as the prisoners are concerned, a change that occurs as a result of the end of the dispersal and, in reality, had its come-out in the month of January, in the absence of the last transfers being completed, in the annual demonstration that they convene every year in Bilbao.
Then, the groups close to the world of prisoners came up with a new emblem in which the traditional map was replaced by the motto Etxera (home), accompanied by two arrows. This is not a claim for amnesty, which they know well is not within what is politically possible, but rather a more ambiguous proclamation that calls for a more flexible prison condition for inmates and a gradual release of those who have been in prison for years. more years.
The general coordinator of EH Bildu, Arnaldo Otegi, went a step further last week, once the last transfers had taken place, and opted for “a future of recognition and reparation for all the victims, and a horizon without prisoners”.
The reality, however, at this moment traces a horizon in which, with the current legislation in hand, the last prisoners to enter prison with crimes of blood, for murders committed between the rupture of the truce in 2006 and the last fatal attack in 2010, would be released from prison around the years 2045-2050.
