The National Court has filed the case against the former leader of the terrorist group ETA Soledad Iparraguirre, Anboto, for the kidnapping and murder of the councilor of the PP from Ermua (Vizcaya) Miguel Ángel Blanco in July 1997 considering that the facts are prescribed.
In an order, the magistrates uphold the appeal of Iparraguirre’s defense, to which the Prosecutor’s Office joined, in which they considered that from the time the crime was committed, on July 13, 1997, until the complaint against the ETA was filed, on February 6, 2022, almost 25 years had passedwhen the statute of limitations was 20 years.
For their part, the popular accusations (exercised by the PP, the Dignity and Justice association, the Victims of Terrorism Association and the Villacisneros Foundation) maintained that the facts were not prescribed at the time when Organic Law 5/2010 of June 22 was approved, which declares the imprescriptibility of terrorism crimes resulting in death. For this reason, they understood that this rule would be applicable to this procedure and the cause would not be prescribed.
This It is the first of the resources appeals resolved by the National Court on the prosecution of the ETA leadership for this terrorist action.
Last March, Judge Manuel García Castellón, who retired in September, prosecuted the former members of the ETA Executive Committee José Javier Arizcuren Ruiz, Kantauri; Miguel Albisu Iriarte, Mikel Antza; María Soledad Iparraguire, Anboto, and Ignacio de Gracia Arregui, Iñaki de Rentería, for the kidnapping and murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco.
He considered the four former members of the ETA leadership to be the authors of crimes of kidnapping and terrorist murder with the aggravating circumstance of treachery when the requirements of mediate authorship were met due to the control of the organization, since they could have prevented the murder but did not do so, which shows “an unequivocal will in producing the result.”
Now the resolution of the Criminal Chamber of the National Court indicates that Anboto’s appeal must be upheld since “otherwise would violate the principles of legalitylegal certainty and non-retroactivity of unfavorable sanctioning norms”.
And remember “the prohibition of the arbitrariness of public powers, precisely in defense of the rule of law that others have tried to take away from us through acts of subversion of the constitutional orderdestabilization of political or economic structures and social terror that has not been completely overcome.”
He explains that, contrary to what the popular and private accusations maintain, exercised by the sister of the deceased, María del Mar Blanco, in the Spanish legal system and jurisprudence “we do not find current resolutions that proclaim the validity of the thesis of retroactivity of criminal regulations that they proclaim”.
That is, “that which considers that a extension of the limitation period can be applied immediately to the criminal prosecution of acts that had not prescribed at the time of its entry into force”.
The judges recall that, as the Prosecutor’s Office indicated at the hearing of this appeal, in the resolution of this issue “We must adhere to what is established in the criminal law and the jurisprudence that interprets it to avoid the disastrous consequences that originated in the so-called Parot doctrine, which was later revoked by the European Court of Human Rights.” And they list, in support of their thesis on retroactivity, numerous rulings from the Supreme Court and the Court Constitutional.
