The Supreme Court Prosecutor’s Office has decided to file the complaints filed by Citizens and Clean Hands against the ERC spokesman in the Congress of Deputies, Gabriel Rufián, for a crime of revealing secrets. The party and the pseudo-union accused the Republican of having leaked to the press the information that the former director of the CNI, Paz Esteban, provided to the deputies in the session of the official secrets commission on May 5, in which he acknowledged that the secret services had spied with Pegasus on 18 independence supporters, including the current president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès.
The shelving of the complaints occurs just a week after the prosecutor of the Criminal Chamber José Javier Huete agreed to initiate criminal investigation proceedings and appointed Judge Antonio Pablo Rives as investigating prosecutor. Now Rives, however, considers that Rufián’s public statements minutes after the commission ended (both to accredited journalists in the lower house and in an interview on TV3) could constitute an administrative infraction, but in no case a crime of revelation of secrets. For this reason, the Prosecutor’s Office believes that these words of the deputy should be studied, and if necessary sanctioned, by the Table of the Congress of Deputies, but not by criminal justice.
Both the complaint by Ciudadanos, which was for an aggravated crime of revelation, and that of Manos Limpias, for a classic revelation, emphasized the alleged data leaked by Rufián in his public appearances at noon on May 5. Among other issues, the deputy said in his speeches to the press that Esteban had acknowledged that “part of the espionage is true”, but that “everything has been under court order”; that he had pointed out possible “foreign nations” as being responsible for other cases of surveillance that the CNI did not acknowledge; or that he had left the door open for other “state agencies” to have “spied beyond their legal possibilities.” Later, Rufián, however, wrote in a tweet that he was commenting on these aspects because all of them had already been “leaked” to the media and that his statements were a mere “interpretation.”
The complaint from the party of Inés Arrimadas was one of the two archived, now the most serious that Rufián faced, since it pointed to him as the author of a crime contemplated in article 598 of the Penal Code, which is punishable by between one and four years. of prison “who, without the purpose of favoring a foreign power, procures, reveals, falsifies or renders useless information legally classified as reserved or secret, related to national security or national defense or related to the technical means or systems used by the Armed Forces or industries of military interest. Its “extreme specificity” – explain Supreme Court magistrates – has made this article of 598 of the Criminal Code almost unknown in the courts, which do not show that they have ever faced it.
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