The Prosecutor’s Office has requested two years in prison for each of the authors of tweets accused of “denigrating and humiliating” the family of a student from Canet de Mar (Barcelona), who judicially requested 25% of classes in Spanish, through messages that called for their “social isolation.” Those investigated would have, according to the prosecutor’s office, attacked moral integrity and ask that they be sentenced to compensate the student and her parents with a total of 9,000 euros for the damage they caused them with their messages on Twitter.
According to the letter, advanced by El Mundo, the family was the subject of harassing messages on social networks throughout the month of December 2021, after they managed to get the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) to impose precautionary measures. of 25% of classes in Spanish in the classroom attended by the minor, who was then 5 years old, at the Turó del Drac school in Canet de Mar.
The TSJC forced the center, as a precaution, to teach 25% of the lessons in Spanish to the group of a P-5 student whose family had initially requested to receive 50% of the classes in Spanish. According to the court, the minor’s family was receiving harassment and threats online, which is why it ordered the then Minister of Education, Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray, and the director of the center, to adopt “the necessary measures to preserve the protection and the identity” of the student. The Barcelona Provincial Prosecutor’s Office then began investigation proceedings for an alleged hate crime.
Now, in its writing, the Prosecutor’s Office understands that this family’s lawsuit unleashed “a hostile response movement with a multitude of publications” on Twitter, where different users “spread humiliating and hurtful expressions” against her on their respective accounts.
In some of these publications, “calls were made for the isolation of the minor” by his schoolmates and, therefore, for his social exclusion for exercising his right to use the Spanish language in the terms established by the courts.
“With such a way of proceeding, they sought to generate feelings of anguish and pain in said family that would make them give up their claim, also serving as a warning to others who, like her, could have identical linguistic approaches,” the public accusation maintains.
In this context of “humiliation and explicit promotion of the isolation of the minor”, one of the accused published the message: “then create the group P5Ñ, put the child alone and make him 50-50.”
Another of the defendants, the indictment adds, insulted the minor’s parents by calling them “terrorists” or calling them “misadapted and intransigent settlers.”
“We want to know the name and address where the family lives”, the town “has to make life impossible for the family” or “we must show that the next family that does so will have to leave the town” are other messages. which the Prosecutor’s Office highlights in its writing.
The public ministry maintains that the defendants subscribed to these types of comments on Twitter and others that could worry Canet’s family, “for containing announcements of future evils in retaliation for the actions of the complainants,” such as: “I’m about to go to stone that child’s house.”
Furthermore, by disseminating the messages “massively and indiscriminately” from public Internet profiles, the accused “gave the contents sufficient social projection so that the family concerned was aware of their respective comments through social networks or third parties.” .
The Barcelona Hate Crimes Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation into the case following complaints from Hablemos Español, Assembly for the Bilingual School (AEB) and Vox.
Turó del Drac was the first school in Catalonia with precautionary measures of 25% that came out of anonymity. Then, there were about thirty schools with precautionary measures of the type that forced classrooms or the entire center to teach 25% of Spanish.
The parents of the school decided to protest a measure not agreed upon by the school board that affects 24 students in that class and that modifies the language project, based on immersion, approved in 2019. It was also the first school to receive the visit of the Minister of Education for this reason. And the first to attract all the media, weeks after it became known that the Supreme Court ratified a ruling issued by the TSJC on the application of 25% in all schools in Catalonia, a measure that was stopped after the approval of the law. of linguistic uses by the Parliament of Catalonia, and a decree law issued by the Government that explicitly prohibits dividing the schedule into percentages of languages.
Faced with this new regulation, the TSJC admitted the “impossibility” of applying the ruling, but decided to raise its doubts about the “unconstitutionality” of the law and the decree to the Constitutional Court, which must now rule on whether it complies with the law.
In any case, the court has continued to impose precautionary measures on 25% of Spanish and Educació has not been able to reverse this judicial imposition in schools.
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