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A divided Constitutional Court refuses to review the conviction of Igor Portu for the ETA attack in T4

2022-05-11T10:54:46.837Z


The ETA leader requested protection from the guarantee body after the European Court of Human Rights estimated that he was mistreated when he was arrested


The Constitutional Court has rejected by 6 votes to 5 the request for protection from ETA member Igor Portu, who requested a review of his sentence for the T-4 attack in which two people died, after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR ) considered that during his detention he was subjected to mistreatment, which was not sufficiently investigated.

The conservative sector of the court has endorsed the decision of the Supreme Court to reject the review of the case, while the progressive bloc, which defended that the appeal should prosper, has announced the presentation of individual votes against the sentence agreed by the guarantee body .

Portu's request for amparo was directed against a Supreme Court order of March 2019, which did not authorize an extraordinary appeal for review against his conviction as co-author of the attack on the T-4 of the Adolfo Suárez Madrid Barajas airport, committed by ETA on 29 of December 2006. The appeal was also directed against a later order that inadmissible the incident of annulment of actions raised against this same order.

The National High Court sentenced Portu in May 2010 to various prison sentences as co-author of a crime of havoc, two crimes of consummated terrorist murder, and forty-eight crimes of attempted terrorist murder.

This ruling was not appealed, so it became final.

At the same time, another criminal procedure was followed against some of the members of the Civil Guard who intervened at the time of the appellant's arrest.

In the first instance, the Provincial Court of Guipúzcoa sentenced four agents as perpetrators of a crime of serious torture, for causing injuries to the appellant for his mere belonging to the terrorist organization ETA.

This decision was revoked by the Supreme Court, which acquitted the agents on November 2, 2011, on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence against them.

This ruling was challenged by Igor Portu before the European Court of Human Rights and the European justice upheld his appeal in 2018.

The Human Rights Court found a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights and condemned Spain for understanding that, at the time of his arrest, Portu had suffered injuries constituting ill-treatment, but that "they could not be classified as torture by lack of conclusive evidence on the purpose with which those injuries were caused.”

Based on this judgment of the ECHR, he asked the Supreme Court to authorize him to request a review of his sentence.

The Supreme Court dismissed the petition and the convicted person requested protection from the Constitutional Court.

Among other reasons, the Supreme Court refused to review the sentence because there was no conviction that proved that the statements of the defendants were obtained through violence or coercion.

It also argued that the appellant's injuries occurred in the premises and under police custody, but there was no evidence of any purpose of obtaining a confession or the existence of any relationship with the evidence used for his conviction.

The ruling of the Constitutional Court ―of which Judge Antonio Narváez Rodríguez has been a rapporteur―, has confirmed the Supreme Court's criteria and has dismissed the amparo appeal.

The court of guarantees considers that "there is no temporal, spatial and personal connection between the ill-treatment suffered by the now claimant for amparo and another defendant and the latter's confession."

It also underlines that "the appellant did not challenge the ruling of the National High Court" and did not discuss "the assessment of the evidence that led to his conviction", therefore "there is no connection between the ill-treatment and the legality, validity and effectiveness of the evidence used to rule out the presumption of innocence of the appellant”.

In this type of appeal —the ruling affirms— "legal certainty must prevail when there is no reason of material justice that justifies annulling a final conviction."

The Vice President of the Constitutional Court, Xiol Ríos, as well as the magistrates María Luisa Balaguer and Inmaculada Montalbán and the magistrates Cándido Conde-Pumpido and Ramón Sáez Valcárcel, all of them from the progressive sector, have announced the formulation of private votes against the sentence.

In the dissenting block, it is considered that the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights is final and supposes a mandate, which should be executed, for which the Supreme Court had to admit the "execution procedure" provided for by law, and then resolve whether or not the imposed sentence was reviewed.

In the opinion of these magistrates, flatly rejecting the execution of the ECHR ruling is legally incorrect and may have harmful international consequences for Spain in the Council of Europe.

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Source: elparis

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