The PSOE maintains with its minority coalition partners the dosage of lime and sand to start the electoral campaign of 28-M, and the transfer of the Sareb flats for social rental and the agreement to approve the Housing law has followed the mutilation of the law for the Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom – known as the law of only yes is yes – to curb the social alarm generated by the sentence reductions resulting from the simplification of criminal types. And it has done so with the variable arithmetic that a sector of mahogany socialism has longed for since the legislature began: leaving aside its coalition partners, the confederal group of Unidas Podemos (UP) and the legislature allies ERC and EH Bildu to agree on the text with the PP, Ciudadanos, the PNV and Junts, that is, the state and nationalist rights.
The disgust and discomfort of both Unidas Podemos as well as republicans and abertzales was manifest yesterday in the same Justice commission in which the paper was voted on, which on Thursday will be ratified by the plenary session of the Congress of Deputies.
The session of the Justice commission, early yesterday, started with evident tension between the allies, and the strategy of the Socialists was, on the one hand, to minimize the changes, treating them as “specifications” and “technical adjustments”, and on the other, responding to the accusations of the Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, mother of the law, who had said that it was humiliating for the feminist movement that the Socialists closed the criminal adjustment with the PP. “Humiliating is to do nothing”, snapped the deputy Laura Berja to defend the reform designed by the Minister of Justice, Pilar Llop.
But the position and criteria of Unidas Podemos and Equality is shared by all the progressive groups in the Chamber, starting with ERC. The Republican deputy Pilar Vallugera emphasized that the old “roller†of bipartisanship was applied to this important law, and stressed that cringing under pressure from television and the right “is not the way to run a State.†Belén Pozueta, from Bildu, was no less explicit, who regretted that the Socialists had flatly rejected her attempt to mediate between the coalition partners, between Justice and Equality, with some amendments that even her own group had doubts about, even though they promoted them. , because they meant giving in to punitive populism, that is, the increase in penalties to mitigate possible social alarm.
Although Bildu insisted that the PSOE has time to reconsider before tomorrow’s plenary session, the truth is that nobody believes it possible, after two months of confrontation between the Llop and Montero portfolios, for the situation to be redirected and the socialist group to allow that the agreement with the left half of the hemicycle be imposed.
The differences between the amendments on the right and left side of the commission were, in any case, minimal, because the available proposals had in common a sharp increase in the penalties for assault and rape based on the violence exerted or even the prevalence by reason of kinship or proximity. However, while the PSOE proposal negotiated with the PP places these circumstances at the core of the definition of the crime, those promoted by Igualdad shift these penalty increases to the consideration of violence, intimidation or kinship as possibly aggravating circumstances of the conviction, but separated from the commission of the crime itself. Equality has always argued that if the criminal type included violence in its definition, the procedural ordeal that the victims have to suffer to prove the commission of the crime against sexual freedom would return.
In the hours prior to the celebration of the commission that has raised the socialist initiative to a presentation, Equality managed to get several hundred jurists to sign a manifesto in defense of the original wording of the law, explaining that the reform was not going to modify the trickle of penal adjustments –because the current wording has been in force, the defendant will always be able to continue taking advantage of it– and that the inclusion in the criminal offense of the existence of violence could mean in practice a return to the previous procedural modality. In addition, the main feminist organizations in the country announced that if the qualifications of the crimes were modified in a different sense from that indicated by the Istanbul agreement, compliance with which is due to this reduction in criminal types with the disappearance of abuse, there will be mobilizations to return to the wording that places consent as the core of the classification of crimes against sexual freedom. None of this has moved the socialist parliamentary group, which maintained its initial plan to agree with the conservative groups.
The deputy of the PNV Mikel Legarda explained the support of his group for the urgency of giving “a solution to the confusion and social unrest”, in the face of a norm that “has not been understood or shared by the citizens or by the victims”. For its part, the Junts per Catalunya group finally decided to join the rest of the conservative formations and support the reform promoted by the PSOE and negotiated with the PP.
