The Spanish government is about to write into law a form of ‘terrorism-lite,’ a crime that would normally be difficult to justify granting impunity.
Under the leadership of socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez, the country’s parliament is preparing a wide-ranging amnesty for Catalan separatists. The bill, expected to be voted on and passed next week, legislates total impunity for all acts committed “in the context of the so-called Catalan independence process” between January 1, 2012 and November 13, 2023, an expanse of time that purposely includes the two illegal separatist referendums carried out in 2014 and 2017.
Alarmingly, terrorism was added to a list of amnestied acts in amendments to the bill made at the request of the Catalan separatist party Junts Per Catalunya, with the caveat “if there has not been a serious violation of human rights.”
The law itself would specify that any “acts committed with the intention of claiming, promoting or seeking the secession or independence of Catalonia, as well as those that would have contributed to the achievement of such purposes” will NOT be prosecuted or punished. It then details a list of excusable crimes: embezzlement, public disorder, attacks on police.
The last attempted referendum in Catalonia was accompanied by weeks of riots that particularly shook the regional capital and Spain’s second city, Barcelona. In 2019, most of the leaders of the referendum were convicted of sedition, rebellion, and embezzlement of public funds.
Among the convicts are leaders of the secessionist group Tsunami Democrátic, which led much of the street agitation that surrounded the actual referendum, including protests at Barcelona airport that disrupted operations and indirectly caused the death of one person. A report from the Civil Guard included in the case described the protests as “terrorism,” given that the group’s “strategy or roadmap consisted of executing large-scale actions that mobilized thousands of people and that compromise[d] [the] economic stability, social, business and institutional stability of Spain.”
The situation became more complicated last November, when a Spanish judge implicated Catalan fugitive and MEP Carles Puigdemont in alleged terrorist activity. Puigdemont was regional president of Catalonia at the time of the 2017 referendum. One of the principal organizers, he fled to Brussels and has been a fugitive from Spanish justice ever since. But this circumstance did not prevent him from continuing to lead the Junts political party and to be elected to the European parliament. In Spain, his party has seven decisive seats in the chamber that it is using to leverage an amnesty that will not only drop criminal charges and punishments against other secessionists, but also allow Puigdemont to return to Spain without having to face the law. Since the judge implicated him in the Tsunami Democrátic case, he could potentially face charges of terrorism.
“Terrorist acts constitute one of the most serious violations” of “enjoyment of human rights and of the fundamental freedoms on which the Union” is based, states European Union directive 2017/541. This means that beneficiaries of the amnesty law may still have difficulty evading the European Union’s definition of terrorism, which does not make a distinction between terrorist acts that are serious violations of human rights and those that are not.
Leftist EU judicial norms—typically given to overriding the national competencies of member states—could on this occasion retain a stricter approach to terrorism than the Spanish government itself.
In a recent post on X, Belén Becerril Atienza—a law professor at Spain’s CEU San Pablo University,—highlighted that this same regulation defines “terrorist purposes” as attempts to “destabilize seriously or destroy the fundamental constitutional, economic, or social political structures of a country.” By calling them terrorist acts, Spain’s Civil Guard identified the airport protest as having exactly that purpose.
In European law, there is no terrorism-lite. Introducing a metaphysical-sounding legal distinction between human rights-infringing and non-human-rights-infringing acts of terror is a recipe for mayhem.