About to serve seven months in prison, the journalist Pablo González, accused of spying for Russia, has just received a new setback from the Polish justice system. The Court of Appeals of the city of Rzeszów (Poland) has rejected the appeal against the three-month extension of his provisional prison, extended for the last time in August, so that he must remain detained until at least November 28 . His stay in pretrial detention, however, may then be extended for another three months, up to one year.
The lawyer assigned to González in Poland, Bartosz Rogala, explained this new judicial decision: “The court did not admit the appeal. The judge partially shared my arguments, but decided to maintain the extension of the arrest.”
In this way, the Basque journalist of Russian origin will serve at least nine months in pretrial detention, before being tried, and in conditions that, according to reports from those around him, are not admissible in a country of the European Union.
This is how his wife, Oihana Goiriena, explains it. “We can communicate by letter, since I have not been able to speak with him since the day he was arrested, on February 28. Since he sends the letters, however, they take months to reach us. Now I get letters from June. The conditions in which he lives are not admissible. He spends 23 hours a day in the cell and can only get out one hour a day. When he goes out, he goes to a very small patio, seven by four meters, and with very high walls. He lives in conditions of total isolation and humiliation. Before going out to the patio they force him to undress, and the same when he returns. It’s a shameful situation,” he explains.
Pablo González has lived in these conditions since he was arrested on February 28 in the Polish city of Rzeswów, very close to the border with Ukraine. Until there he had moved three days before, with the aim of covering the invasion of Ukraine as a freelance for media such as Público, La Sexta or Gara.
A few hours after his arrest, the Polish government spokesman, Stanislaw Zaryn, told the Pap news agency that the journalist is accused of spying for Russia: “He carried out activities for Russia while taking advantage of his journalistic status. This allowed him to move freely throughout Europe and the world, including areas affected by armed conflict and areas of political tension”, he indicated. At that time, in addition, it was leaked that he was traveling with two passports “with different identity”.
This version, however, collides with the one maintained by his defense, his family and his circle of friends, in the field of journalism and at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).
The grandson of a war child, Pablo González was born in April 1982 in Moscow and lived there until he was 9 years old. Then, his parents divorced and his mother headed to the land of origin of his father. They lived for a year in Bilbao and then moved to Catalonia. At the age of 23 he met his wife, Oihana Goiriena, settled in the Basque Country and started a family. Upon his arrival in Spain, his mother had registered Pablo – until then Pavel – with his Spanish name and his surname. Hence the two identities of his Russian and Spanish passports, as explained by his defense, providing documentary evidence.
González has a degree in Slavic Philology, and in recent years, after completing a master’s degree in Journalism at El Correo, he worked as a journalist specializing in the post-Soviet space for different media outlets. In addition, he was doing a doctoral thesis on the persecution of the LGTB movement in Georgia, as explained by the University of the Basque Country (UPV / EHU).
González closely followed political news in Eastern Europe, and in recent years he had traveled to Ukraine on more than one occasion, especially to Donbas. On social networks he had clearly spoken out against the war and Putin’s policy towards Ukraine.
On his last visit to Ukraine before his arrest, he had an experience that may shed light on his subsequent arrest.
When he was in eastern Ukraine working as a journalist, at the beginning of February, he received a call from the secret services of that country, asking him to appear in Kyiv. There, he was interrogated and accused of being “pro-Russian”, although he was released and returned to Spain.
In parallel, while he was still in Ukraine, the CNI visited his family home, in the outskirts of Gernika, where his wife was with one of their children; he also visited the home of his mother, in the province of Barcelona, ??and that of a friend, in the Catalan capital. Knowing those movements, González returned immediately.
“About eight people came, in two vans. As far as I know they didn’t record anything. They simply asked us questions and let us see that they knew Pablo’s career, from where he had traveled, etc, ”recalled Oihana Goiriena for La Vanguardia.
The Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, was asked about these events in Congress and recognized that the CNI carried out the aforementioned movements. The minister, however, did not go further and limited herself to pointing out that she respects the “presumption of innocence” of the Basque journalist, but also “the application of the Polish legal system, which we may or may not share.”
The Government of Spain has recently insisted that González has consular protection “like any other Spaniard.” The family, however, misses a greater involvement of the Spanish Executive in defending him.
The directors of the main Basque newspapers have published a letter this weekend, at the initiative of the Association and the Basque College of Journalists, in which they asked “all the institutions involved to make an effort for his release and to guarantee that he has a fair and transparent judicial process, regardless of the outcome”.
