The Provincial Court of Barcelona has confirmed the decision of the investigating court number 7 of Barcelona to send a total of 46 agents of the National Police to trial for the charges in the different schools of the city of Barcelona during the celebration of the referendum of 1 October 2017 declared illegal by the Constitutional Court.
The Court, which has rejected all the appeals presented by the defense of the agents and by the accusations – almost fifty -, thus reaffirms the criteria of the instructor, who considers that there are sufficient indications of crimes of injuries and against moral integrity of the voters.
In an order, the court rules out charging more agents – the reason for the appeals of the accusations, particularly of commanders – but also rules out filing the case against any of them, denying the requests of their defenses, with the majority support of the Public Prosecutor’s Office. .
The order establishes that “the indicative legal classification that the order grants to the events described goes beyond simple crimes of injury and clearly indicates that some conduct could be included in the crime against moral integrity committed by the public official to which it refers. the art. 175 CP”.
In the interlocutory session known this Thursday, the Court confirms, beyond some specific corrections, the order of Judge Francisco Miralles from January 2023 in which he agreed to initiate an abbreviated procedure against 45 public officials of the National Police Corps and provisionally dismiss the procedure against another 17 agents and definitively with respect to three others. The judge himself later expanded the proceedings to two more agents but in May he decreed the extinction of responsibility of another who had died.
In his ruling in January of last year, the judge left both the Professional Police Union and the Generalitat as owner of the affected centers out of the case as a private accusation. The first is because there has not been any private citizen accused of attacking authority, disobedience to an agent of authority or any crime, the objective of this union in his personification. The second, having agreed in the same order to dismiss the procedure regarding the damages caused to the schools and institutes. The Provincial Court also confirms these exclusions.
In January 2023, the judge gave a detailed account of what happened on October 1 in different schools based on the witnesses collected and the existing videos and ruled to continue with the procedure in all those cases in which he did not appreciate proportionality in the actions of the agents after remembering that the agents were assigned to Barcelona to comply with the order of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) that obliged them to prevent the referendum “without affecting normal citizen coexistence.” In this sense, the Court of Barcelona points out that “any conduct cannot be justified in the existence of a court order that caused the intervention to invoke the defenses” invoked by some defense resources.
The court makes a close defense of the judge’s instruction “with rational, coherent, objective and dispassionate criteria, without any hint of political or ideological contamination” and scolds the accusations by pointing out that this “is more than can be said about the content of the resources”.
