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The Basque Government rejects 200 of the 310 requests from prisoners to serve a sentence in its prisons

2022-08-16T22:41:00.550Z


Since taking over the management of the prisons in Euskadi, the Executive of Urkullu has accepted 36 petitions from people convicted of ETA terrorism


Hundreds of prisoners have requested to be transferred to the penitentiary centers of Zaballa (Álava), Basauri (Bizkaia) and Martutene (Gipuzkoa) since the Basque Government assumed its management on October 1.

According to the Department of Equality, Justice and Social Policies, in these 10 months they have received 310 requests, of which 200 have been rejected. Among those accepted, 36 correspond to inmates sentenced for their activity in ETA.

Another five ETA inmates are pending.

On the contrary, in the same period, only 96 inmates who were confined in them have asked to leave them to go to prisons outside the community.

63 have been accepted, according to data from the Basque Executive.

The prisons of Euskadi currently have 1,516 inmates - more than a hundred are members of the extinct terrorist organization - and they are,

according to sources from the Basque Executive, to the limit of their capacity with the staff of officials they have.

In numerous minutes of resolution with which the Government of Vitoria has rejected as "inadmissible" the transfer of prisoners to its prisons, the "shortage of places in the Euskadi penitentiary centers" is precisely stated as the cause.

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Three out of four ETA prisoners are already serving their sentences in prisons in the Basque Country or Navarra

This attraction exerted by the Basque prisons on the inmate population of the rest of the prisons in Spain was already recognized by the councilor Beatriz Artolazabal (PNV) in a parliamentary response last April: "It seems that the transfer has been able to generate expectations of entering centers Basques or transfer to them of more people than before, or of people who had not shown such interest or had been denied as inadmissible.

At that time, six months after Vitoria took over, the Basque Executive had already rejected 110 applications and accepted another 80, of which 29 were from ETA prisoners.

Current figures support this trend.

Open sentences

Jaime Tapia, magistrate and prison policy adviser to the Executive of Iñigo Urkullu, points out that a large part of this increase may be motivated by the announced aspiration of the Basque Government to promote the third degree or semi-liberty so that at least 40% of prisoners (50% in the case of women) serve their sentences in an open regime.

Currently there are 442, 29%, a higher percentage than the rest of the state prisons, which stood at 18.8% last June.

Some associations of victims of terrorism are suspicious of this measure and the PP and Vox accuse the Basque Government of proposing a prison model "to the measure of ETA".

Tapia understands it as "a legitimate aspiration" that prisoners imprisoned in other communities request a transfer to try to gain access to prison benefits, but he denies that this is giving ETA prisoners a favorable treatment.

"All inmates are treated equally," he emphasizes and assures that the arrival of some ETA members has been rejected, whose number he does not specify.

“ETA prisoners have special circumstances.

They have spent many years in the first degree [penitentiary, the hardest], sometimes in an unjustified way, and have served a large part of their sentences in prisons very far from the Basque Country, and that is taken into account when accepting their transfer," he adds.

The main argument used by prisoners to request a prison transfer is the supposed proximity of the center they want to go to with their place of family and social roots.

It is a possibility contemplated in the general penitentiary law to facilitate reintegration.

However, the application of this precept is not automatic and the final decision remains in the hands of the Administration, which is the one that ultimately assigns the prisoners to one or another prison for organizational reasons.

"The law leaves the Administration a wide margin of interpretation that can lead to arbitrariness," says Blanca Ramos, president of the subcommittee on prison law of the General Council of Lawyers.

However, the prisoner can always appeal the decision.

Tapia emphasizes that “the transfer by roots does not constitute a subjective right [of the inmates]” and recalls that there is no “written rule” that determines what the minimum requirements are to consider that link with a place verified.

“We have had prisoners who have requested a transfer claiming that they had their parents, a brother or even a cousin in the Basque Country, but whose wife and children, who are the ones who usually communicate with him [prison visits and calls by phone], lived near where they were being held.

These have been rejected”, explains the advisor to the Basque Government.

The person in charge of penitentiary law of the General Council of Lawyers insists that each case must be studied individually and asks that “what the inmate raises is prioritized to decide on whether there is roots or not,

In these 10 months, the Basque Government has faced a whole casuistry of requests for transfers to its prisons which, in the opinion of sources from the Department of Justice, explain the high number of rejected requests.

"The reasons for not accepting them are diverse and, sometimes, multiple or combined," they add.

Thus, the transfer has been denied to prisoners who should be available to courts and tribunals of other autonomous communities because they have pending legal proceedings.

On other occasions, because there was a court order expelling the inmate from Spain once he had served his sentence.

The Basque Government has also argued on occasions that Basque prisons do not have certain "suitable treatment resources to address the specific needs" for the inmate or, even,

It has also been denied to inmates who had already been before the transfer of powers in some of the three Basque prisons, but who in their day were taken to other prisons "due to regimental maladjustment", that is, due to conflicts.

Tapia points out that in these months a curious phenomenon has taken place: people recently sentenced in other communities who have come to Basque prisons with the order to enter prison to begin serving their sentences there.

Tapia details that there are currently "between 300 and 400 prisoners" in Basque jails who have no roots in the community.

“Does that mean that we are going to send them to other prisons?

Not much less.

Some are immersed in reinsertion processes that should not be interrupted.

It is not about making an exchange of prisoners with the Interior”, he emphasizes.

Prison officials stationed in Euskadi criticize the arguments put forward by the Basque Executive to reject so many requests and accuse it of only accepting inmates with little conflict to achieve "a prison population to measure".

Another worker adds that with the ETA prisoners this supposed premise is fulfilled: “They are not problematic.

They have been integrated into prison day-to-day with the intention of accessing benefits.”

Currently, of the more than 1,500 inmates who depend on the three prisons in the Basque Country, six (0.4%) were classified in the first degree, the prison system that is applied to dangerous prisoners or those who show a clear maladjustment.

In prisons dependent on the Interior, where in June there were just over 47,000 prisoners, there were 372 (0.8%).

Tapia rejects these accusations and points out that, before the Government transferred the management of the three prisons to the Basque Executive, the profile of the inmates imprisoned there was very similar to the current one and that then, as now, there were no modules with security measures. specific security to receive prisoners in the first degree.

"Next year there will be one in Zaballa [prison]," he advances.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-08-16

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