With the transactional amendments agreed yesterday between the PSOE, Junts and ERC, the central government has definitively closed the amnesty law for those accused of the process, and no longer accepts any further changes. In this way, the Executive also sees the approval of this legislative initiative, key to the investiture of Pedro Sánchez and for the start of the current legislature, next week at the plenary session of Congress, guaranteed. “By an absolute majority of 178 seats”, emphasize from La Moncloa to La Vanguardia.
Despite the fact that some partial amendments registered by Junts and ERC will still be alive at the January 30 plenary session, socialist sources warn that they will expire, since they will not have a sufficient majority for them to prosper. The PSOE is only prepared to vote in favor of the set of amendments already agreed, together with Junts i Esquerra, Sumar i Podem, the PNB and EH Bildu.
Minister Félix Bolaños emphasized yesterday that these two “technical amendments”, already incorporated in the report of the Justice Commission’s report, “improve a law that was already sound by itself, technically, completely in accordance with the Constitution and to the law of the European Union”.
The minister defended that “terrorism is maintained as a crime excepted from the application of the Amnesty law as long as it involves a serious violation of human rights, as stated in the European directive and the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms “. “We said that terrorism was outside the amnesty law and it is outside it when it involves serious violations of human rights”, concluded Bolaños.
Socialist sources point out that these “latest changes” prevent the law from becoming a “big strainer” to take advantage of the amnesty and guarantee the legal security of the rule. “There is nothing outside the pro-independence process that will be amnestied”, said the Minister of the Presidency.
After the expected approval of the Amnesty law next week in the plenary session of Congress, the rule will set its course for the Senate, where the absolute majority of the PP wants to delay its processing for two months. With this calendar, the Government anticipates that the amnesty will be definitively approved in the first week of April. The Spanish Executive has the same time frame – beginning of April – for the approval of the new general State budgets.
The vision that the PP has of the agreement agreed between the PSOE, Junts and ERC for the Amnesty law is very different from that of the Spanish Government. The PP considers it an “indignity” and an “insult to the intelligence of the Spanish”, because despite what the Executive says, they underline, terrorism crimes will be amnestied.
So the agreement was made public, the popular spokesman in Congress, Miguel Tellado, again asked the PSOE to suspend the processing of the law, because including among the amnesty crimes those of less serious terrorism, “is a historical mistake immense”, which is perpetrated by overcoming a new red line “that the PSOE had just a week ago”.
This means, in his opinion, that the PSOE “has lost what little dignity it had left”. For Tellado, “what the PSOE is doing is humiliating our democracy”. And the Spanish Government, as he denounced, “has become a real problem”.
The general secretary of the PP, Cuca Gamarra, for her part insisted on this line of attack: “Amnestying terrorism crimes with a firm sentence was a red line for the PSOE a week ago. Today there is no longer a red line for this illegal, unjust and immoral amnesty”. “140 years of history to end up submitting to the refugee is Sánchez’s payment for being in Moncloa”, warned Gamarra.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo also showed his total opposition to the introduced amendment. “They always fall lower”, said Feijóo of the Socialists. In his opinion, the Spanish Government and its partners “compromise against the dignity of citizens, and now insult their intelligence to justify another lie”. And he ended by saying that “terrorism is not covered up or forgiven, it is investigated and condemned until the end”.
