The Central Government has announced that it will take breaches of the legislation on democratic memory to the United Nations and the European Union.
La Moncloa made the decision public after an unprecedented visit by President Pedro Sánchez yesterday to the crypt of Cuelgamuros – the old Valley of the Fallen – where there are still thousands of unidentified human remains.
The Spanish Executive announced this same week that it will file appeals of unconstitutionality against the so-called concord laws promoted almost simultaneously by three autonomous governments, Aragon, the Valencian Community and Castile and Leon, governed in all three cases by coalitions of the Popular Party and the ultra-nationalists of Vox, who question the State’s policy on memory.
Now the Government has also decided to deploy its response beyond the Spanish institutional framework, which it will transmit to Europe and especially to the United Nations, where for many years successive Spanish governments have been heavily criticized for the policy of the oblivion towards the thousands of victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship, especially due to the fact that even today, eighty years later, there are bodies in unidentified graves and an unknown number of disappeared. The UN at the time congratulated the government when it pledged in 2018 to push forward a recovery strategy.
In a statement made public yesterday, Moncloa announces that it will take the initiatives of the three regional governments to the main European and international bodies – the UN, the European Parliament and the Council of Europe – due to “their seriousness”.
“The law will be enforced and we must settle the outstanding debt with those who gave their lives fighting for freedom and democracy in Spain,” said Sánchez in a message on social networks.
Specifically, the Central Executive plans to appeal to the special rapporteur on Truth, Justice and Reparation and the rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions of the United Nations to “assess the conformity of these measures with the best international practices and the international commitments acquired by Spain in matters of human rights.
In addition, the Executive intends to promote different initiatives in the same sense so that they are included in the agenda of the plenary session of the European Parliament for debate and voting by the socialist group.
Finally, the central government, alleging the “possible violation of various provisions of the Human Rights Convention, will also promote an urgent debate in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to analyze the repeal of these memory laws, will inform the general secretary of the Council of Europe and the Commissioner for Human Rights to make them aware of “the seriousness of the situation” and will request the Council of Europe to draw up a report on the situation of the democratic memory in Spain
On February 15, the Courts of Aragon repealed the autonomic law of democratic memory with the support of the PP, Vox and the Regionalist Aragonese Party and six days later, on March 21, the Valencian Community, where the PP governs in coalition and Vox, presented a proposal for a law of concord that will replace the current autonomic law of memory and that, according to Vox, will eliminate the terms “civil war” and maintain the reparation of all victims.
In the same vein, the PP and Vox, which govern together in Castile and Leon, presented on March 26 a “concord” law proposal to replace the current autonomous decree of historical memory. This new rule does not include an express condemnation of the Franco regime, while deleting the word dictatorship to refer to the period between 1939 and the arrival of democracy.
