Amnesty International (AI) has expressed its concern in its 2022 annual report for Spain about the use of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware on mobile phones of prominent Catalan political figures, journalists, legal professionals, and their families by time that has regretted that during the past year the investigations on this matter that were being carried out by the courts of Catalonia continued to stall.
The report also mentions the 12-month prison sentence of a police officer for the crime of false testimony against certain Catalan politicians, a sentence that the international NGO links to broader ongoing criminal investigations into “a secret network, called the patriotic police , suspected of falsifying evidence to undermine the political group Podemos and leaders of the Catalan independence movement”.
In addition, the human rights organization recalls that at the end of the year, “criminal investigations into the illegitimate use of force by the police were still open” in the context of the October 2017 protests held in Catalonia.
Beyond this, the report also denounces “serious violations of the rights of refugees and migrants” at the borders by the authorities and focuses on the tragedy of the Melilla fence that occurred on June 24. “The Spanish and Moroccan authorities used unlawful force and committed acts that could amount to torture and other ill-treatment to suppress the attempt by a large group of people, made up exclusively of black men from sub-Saharan Africa, to enter Melilla, a Spanish enclave in northern Morocco, and request protection”, says the AI ??text, which recalls that at least 37 people died and adds that “more than 470 were illegally expelled”.
The NGO warns that violence against women persists and recalls that 49 women died at the hands of their partner or ex-partner in 2022. However, it sees positive the entry into force of the Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom law, better known as law of the only yes is yes, which reformed the Penal Code redefining the crime of sexual violence based on the lack of consent. He also describes as “historic” the Trans law bill, which recognizes the right to gender self-determination and allows transgender people to obtain legal recognition of their gender and change gender indicators on identity documents without need to undergo hormonal treatment or obtain a medical report.
For Amnesty International, neither the national government nor the regional governments allocated sufficient funds to protect the right to health over the past year and the authorities did not adequately investigate the deaths of elderly people in residences during the covid pandemic. In this sense, the NGO highlights that almost 90% of the investigations by the Prosecutor’s Office were shelved despite the fact that the State Attorney General recognized that human rights violations had been committed in these centers and that most of the commissions of investigation of the autonomous communities were closed without a clear explanation.
