“It is not the Parot doctrine.” It is what resonates these days in the National Court after the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that gave the reason to the ETA member Xabier Atristain in that the statements he made incommunicado should not be taken into account to condemn him.
And at first, it seemed. The Victims of Terrorism Association (AVT) warned of the risk of “mass releases” because what was at stake was the very incommunicado regime that operated in Spain until 2015 with the consent of the Constitutional Court. If the ECHR questioned it and the Legal Profession was not convinced that it was legal at that time and did not violate rights, many terrorists would queue up to try to annul sentences.
But Strasbourg did not enter there. The ruling is limited to the incommunicado detention of Atristain, where he was not sufficiently motivated to have a court-appointed lawyer imposed on him and therefore, what he declared is considered to be invalid. Hence, he asks to review the sentence.
Now, when a person convicted of the attacks in Catalonia in 2017 asks to review his case in the same terms and another jihadist awaiting trial announces that he will do the same, the sources consulted by ABC speak of a “flat nail” because in their cases the law after 2015, which already included the necessary motivation required by the ECHR. The key will be whether it was applied correctly in each case and whether that was the only test, which is extremely rare.
Another thing, these sources comment, is that there are judges who apply the ruling by excluding incommunicado statements from the test, just as those given before police forces are already reviled. This is what happened with the ETA members ‘Gaddafi’ and Gorka Palacios, who were acquitted for not appreciating that there was more evidence than that type of statements by third parties, although their guarantee was not seen during the trial. Hence, the challenge facing new procedures. Prove from trial to trial that the incommunicado detention of the person whose statement is considered relevant evidence of the charge was in accordance with the law.
