The United Nations issued a strong report yesterday without much room for interpretation: the so-called concord laws promoted by the PP and Vox governments in Aragon, Castile and Leon and the Valencian Community put compliance by Spain at risk of the international legislation on “the preservation of the historical memory of serious violations of human rights”.
After analyzing the projects of the three communities, the international body ensures that these initiatives establish the suppression of multiple entities, projects, websites and activities of historical memory and may bring “limits to access to the truth about the destiny or whereabouts of the victims” of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. In addition, they consider that they can make invisible the “serious violations” of human rights committed during Franco’s regime, because they do not explicitly refer to or condemn “the regime, its dictatorial nature or its responsibility” for the crimes committed during that period.
The report also points to the importance of not discriminating between types of victims when recognizing them and giving them justice and reparation, although they point out that the laws of concord could lead to assimilating the violations that took place during the Franco dictatorship and the Civil War “to a heterogeneous group of crimes or violations committed by different actors, state and non-state, throughout the 20th century in Spain”. In his view, this deprives “hundreds of thousands” of people who died in extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances that took place during Franco’s regime from the necessary recognition and attention.
For all this, they remember that all the powers of the State – executive, legislative and judicial – and all national, regional or local government entities “must comply with the obligation to protect human rights”, including the obligation to guarantee “the historical preservation of the memory of serious violations” of the same, as well as to prevent “revisionist or denialist” theses from emerging. Failure to comply, they underline, runs the risk of “compromising the responsibility” of the State.
After the news was made public, the leaders of the PP and the presidents of the designated communities came out en masse to criticize and disavow the report, which they accused of lacking the truth.
One of the most angry was the president of Aragon, Jorge Azcón, who discredited the text claiming that it contains “errors like a house” and “falornias”, because no law of concord has been approved in his community , but what is there is a plan that is still being processed. The popular said that its content should be “more serious”, a fact that it attributes to the lack of communication between the international body and its Government and to its trust in the information conveyed by the Government of Spain. “What this report says is a lie, there should be more seriousness. This leaves the UN in a bad place, which has not counted on Aragon to make the report”, he pointed out.
From the Valencian Community, President Carlos Mazón warned that the report does not obey a reading of the Valencian bill and that, since he has been in power, 442 exhumations have been carried out “caused by the violence of the Franco dictatorship “. In this sense, he defended that the proposal for the Valencian concord law, currently being processed in the Courts, “consolidates and protects the rights of all the victims” of the dictatorship and “incorporates new rights” to other victims of political violence such as those of ETA.
Meanwhile, the president of the Junta de Castilla y León, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, assured that he does not know the controversial report, and insisted that he has already publicly condemned the Franco dictatorship. “When I meet him we will talk, but in Castile and Leon we make a point of always treating victims well, all victims”, he said.
For his part, the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, emphasized on the subject that “it is best to read the texts and not to pass laws that have not yet been approved”. In an election event in Figueres, Feijóo argued that, due to his training, Franco’s forty years “have been a dictatorship” and ETA has been “a terrorist group”. “Unfortunately, the Government has a commitment to Bildu and cannot talk about a terrorist group. We do”, he postulated.
In Vox they described the text as “quite an advertising scam”, something that, in their opinion, shows what these “globalist bodies” are for: “to help obedient governments with the 2030 Agenda when they need a smoke screen”. they assured
The last to react, last night, was the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, who was forceful in an X post: “Equating victims with executioners is the opposite of harmony. To equate dictatorship with democracy is the opposite of the truth. The retreat represented by the autonomous governments of Feijóo and Abascal are not a threat, but a reality. The Spanish Government will defend the democratic memory and the dignity of the victims of the Franco regime”, he stated.
