After Barcelona: Proces against police and spanish government

We, CARLES ARCAS HERNÁNDEZ i JAUME MOYA MATAS, being counsels at this court, on behalf of FEDERACIÓ CATALANA D’ORGANITZACIONS NO GOVERNAMENTALS PEL DESENVOLUPAMENT, MESA CÍVICA PELS DRETS SOCIALS ASSOCIACIÓ CATALANA PER A LA DEFENSA DELS DRETS HUMANS, ELS VERDS, XARXA CIUTADANA PER L’ABOLICIÓ DEL DEUTE EXTERN, FEDERACIÓ DE VEINS I VEINES DE BARCELONA, RED CIUDADANA POR LA ABOLICIÓN DE LA DEUDA EXTERNA, ATTAC CATALUNYA, SINDICAT DE PERIODISTES DE CATALUNYA, PARTIT DELS COMUNISTES DE CATALUNYA, ESQUERRA UNIDA I ALTERNATIVA, JUSTÍCIA I PAU, INICIATIVA PER CATALUNYA-ELS VERDS, UGT-CATALUNYA, ESQUERRA REPUBLICANA DE CATALUNYA, PSUC-VIU, ÈTICA I SOCIETAT, AVALOT-JOVES UGT CATALUNYA, SETEM CATALUNYA, ENTREPOBLES, ASSOCIACIÓ DE VOLUNTARIS VOLS?, JOVES COMUNISTES, INTERSINDICAL ALTERNATIVA DE CATALUNYA, JOVENTUT OBRERA DE CATALUNYA I ILLES, ATENEU POPULAR DE SARRIÀ, ACCIÓ JOVES C.C.O.O. CATALUNYA, COL·LECTIUS COMUNISTES DE CATALUNYA, MON-3, CAMPANYA DE DESOBEDIÈNCIA CIVIL CONTRA LA LLEI D’ESTRANGERIA, CONSELL DE JOVENTUT DE BARCELONA, SETEM CATALUNYA, SECCIÓ, SINDICAL DE CCOO DE L’AJUNTAMENT DE MONTCADA I REIXAC, MON VERD (SOCIETAT COOPERATIVA CATALANA DE RESPONSABILITAT LIMITADA), ASSEMBLEA D’ENTITATS ECOLOGISTES DE CATALUNYA, ECOLOGISTES EN ACCIÓ DE CATALUNYA, COOPERACIÓ DE CONSUMIDORS PROD. ECO-BIO GERMINAL, XARXA ANTITRANSGÈNICS, PARTIT COMUNISTA DELS POBLES D’ESPANYA, MONITORS COOPERANTS D’OLOT, PER UNA ABRERA SOLIDÀRIA, FUNDACIÓ AKWABA, SECCIÓ SINDICAL DE CCOO DELPHI MECHATRONIC, SOS RACISME CATALUNYA, GRUP BAULA SANT CUGAT, PLATAFORMA CAMPANYA CONTRA EL BM DE RUBÍ, GCCT (GRUP DE COOPERACIÓ DEL CAMPUS DE TERRASSA), ASOCIACIÓN DE VECINOS Y CULTURAL “CERCLE VERD” DE BENICAPLAP, INTERSINDICAL ALTERNATIVA DE CATALUNYA, COLECTIVO CRALED, CAMPANYA CONTRA EL BANC MUNDIAL BARCELONA 2001, PLATAFORMA OTRO MUNDO ES POSIBLE DE SALAMANCA, CAMPANYA DE DESOBEDIÈNCIA CIVIL A LA LLEI D’ESTRANGERIA, COL·LECTIU DE SOLIDARITAT LA CHICHIGUA, ATENEU ENCICLOPÈDIC POPULAR CDHS, ESCLETXA, PLATAFORMA 0,7 PONENT, ASSOCIACIÓ DE COMERÇ JUST DE LLEIDA, ASSOCIACIÓ ECOCONCERN INNOVACIÓ SOCIAL, COMITÉ ÒSCAR ROMERO DE BARCELONA, , SOLIDARITAT SENSE MONS, ESCOLTES CATALANS, ASSOCIACIÓ DE PARES I MARES ALARMATS PELS FETS DE SANTS, ASSOCIACIÓ CATALANA DE BRIGADISTES A NICARAGUA, LA GARRIGA SOCIETAT CIVIL, CNT-AIT (COMITÉ REGIONAL DE CATALUNYA), ASSOCIACIÓ ACCIÓ ECOLOGISTA-VIURE SENSE NUCLEARS, COL·LECTIU DE SOLIDARITAT AMB LA REBEL·LIÓ ZAPATISTA DE BARCELONA, ACTUA (ASSOCIACIÓ DE PERSONES QUE VIVIM AMB EL VIH), DERECHOS PARA TOD@S, CGT, in accordance with what has been confirmed to us as is recorded in the corresponding annexes, appear before this tribunal and

That by means of the present document we are taking a Citizens’ Penal Suit because we consider that the acts outlined below constitute the crimes of injuries, under Article 147, of damages, under Art. 514.3 in relation to Art. 263, of illegal detention, under Art. 167, against the exercise of civil rights covered by Art. 540 and 542, committed in the frame of reference of the fundamental rights of Art. 514.3 and 4, of supression of Art. 172, and of neglect of the duty under Art. 408 to combat crimes, all Articles being of the current Penal Code, against the persons who we will list below and persons whose identity may be deduced from the present proceedings.

In accordance with Article 783.1 of the Law of Criminal Prosecution (LECr), we declare that we are taking the penal and civil accions which arise from the crime

In accordance with Art. 270 ff of the LECr, we indicate the following

This Action is being taken before the Penal Section of the High Court of Catalonia, which we understand to be the competent authority given that the suit is being taken against, among others, the Delegate of the Government in Catalonia, the administrative authority whose jurisdiction coincides with that of this Court. And in the absence of express legislative reference, applying Art. 73.3 of the Organic Law of the Judiciary, in relation to Art. 38 of the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia, we consider this Court to be the competent authority.

The plaintiffs are the following bodies:

1. FEDERACIÓ CATALANA D’ONG PEL DESENVOLUPAMENT.
2. MESA CÍVICA PELS DRETS SOCIALS ASSOCIACIÓ CATALANA PER A LA DEFENSA DELS DRETS HUMANS.
3. ELS VERDS.
4. XARXA CIUTADANA PER L’ABOLICIÓ DEL DEUTE EXTERN.
5. RED CIUDADANA POR LA ABOLICIÓN DE LA DEUDA EXTERNA.
6. ASSOCIACIÓ DE MARES I PARES ALARMATS PELS FETS DE SANTS.
7. SINDICAT DE PERIODISTES DE CATALUNYA.
8. PARTIT DELS COMUNISTES DE CATALUNYA.
9. FEDERACIÓ DE VEÏNES I VEÏNS DE BARCELONA.
10. ESQUERRA UNIDA I ALTERNATIVA.
11. ESQUERRA REPUBLICANA DE CATALUNYA.
12. PSUC-VIU.
13. ÈTICA I SOCIETAT.
14. AVALOT-JOVES UGT CATALUNYA.
15. SETEM CATALUNYA.
16. ENTREPOBLES.
17. ASSOCIACIÓ DE VOLUNTARIS VOLS?
18. JOVES COMUNISTES.
19. INTERSINDICAL ALTERNATIVA DE CATALUNYA.
20. JOVENTUT OBRERA DE CATALUNYA I ILLES.
21. ATENEU POPULAR DE SARRIÀ.
22. ATTACC.
23. ACCIÓ JOVES C.C.O.O. CATALUNYA.
24. COL·LECTIUS COMUNISTES DE CATALUNYA.
25. MON-3.
26. CAMPANYA DE DESOBEDIÈNCIA CIVIL CONTRA LA LLEI D’ESTRANGERIA.
27. MESA CÍVICA PELS DRETS SOCIALS.
28. SECCIÓ SINDICAL DE CCOO DE L’AJUNTAMENT DE MONTCADA I REIXAC.
29. JUSTÍCIA I PAU.
30. INICIATIVA PER CATALUNYA-ELS VERDS.
31. FEDERACIÓ D’ASSOCIACONS DE VEÏNS I VEÏNES DE BARCELONA (FAVB).
32. UGT-CATALUNYA.
33. MON VERD (SOCIETAT COOPERATIVA CATALANA DE RESPONSABILITAT LIMITADA).
34. ASSEMBLEA D’ENTITATS ECOLOGISTES DE CATALUNYA.
35. ECOLOGISTES EN ACCIÓ DE CATALUNYA.
36. COOPERACIÓ DE CONSUMIDORS PROD. ECO-BIO GERMINAL.
37. XARXA ANTITRANSGÈNICS.
38. PARTIT COMUNISTA DELS POBLES D’ESPANYA.
39. MONITORS COOPERANTS D’OLOT.
40. PER UNA ABRERA SOLIDÀRIA.
41. FUNDACIÓ AKWABA.
42. SECCIÓ SINDICAL DE CCOO DELPHI MECHATRONIC.
43. SOS RACISME CATALUNYA.
44. GRUP BAULA SANT CUGAT.
45. PLATAFORMA CAMPANYA CONTRA EL BM DE RUBÍ.
46. GCCT (GRUP DE COOPERACIÓ DEL CAMPUS DE TERRASSA).
47. ASOCIACIÓN DE VECINOS Y CULTURAL “CERCLE VERD” DE BENICAPLAP.
48. INTERSINDICAL ALTERNATIVA DE CATALUNYA.
49. COLECTIVO CRALED.
50. CAMPANYA CONTRA EL BANC MUNDIAL BARCELONA 2001.
51. CONSELL DE JOVENTUT DE BARCELONA.
52. PLATAFORMA OTRO MUNDO ES POSIBLE DE SALAMANCA.
53. CAMPANYA DE DESOBEDIÈNCIA CIVIL A LA LLEI D’ESTRANGERIA.
54. COL·LECTIU DE SOLIDARITAT LA CHICHIGUA.
55. ATENEU ENCICLOPÈDIC POPULAR CDHS.
56. ESCLETXA.
57. PLATAFORMA 0,7 PONENT.
58. ASSOCIACIÓ DE COMERÇ JUST DE LLEIDA.
59. ASSOCIACIÓ ECOCONCERN INNOVACIÓ SOCIAL.
60. COMITÉ ÒSCAR ROMERO DE BARCELONA.
61. SETEM CATALUNYA.
62. SOLIDARITAT SENSE MONS.
63. ESCOLTES CATALANS.
64. ASSOCIACIÓ DE PARES I MARES ALARMATS PELS FETS DE SANTS.
65. ASSOCIACIÓ CATALANA DE BRIGADISTES A NICARAGUA.
66. LA GARRIGA SOCIETAT CIVIL.
67. CNT-AIT (COMITÉ REGIONAL DE CATALUNYA).
68. ASSOCIACIÓ ACCIÓ ECOLOGISTA-VIURE SENSE NUCLEARS.
69. COL·LECTIU DE SOLIDARITAT AMB LA REBEL·LIÓ ZAPATISTA DE BARCELONA.
70. ACTUA (ASSOCIACIÓ DE PERSONES QUE VIVIM AMB EL VIH).
71. DERECHOS PARA TOD@S.
72. CGT .

The defendants, without prejudicing the possibility of taking civil and penal suits against other persons who may in the course of this case turn out to have been involved in the events, are:

 Sra. Julia Garcia Valdecasas, Delegate of the Government in Catalonia

 Sr. David Bonet i Roca, Subdelegate of the Government in Barcelona

 The Chief Commissionerrs Àngel Artregui and Silverio Blanco of the National Police Force, who command the Barcelona Information Brigade and the “Operations Group of the Police Intervention Unit” (UIP), respectively.

 The plainclothes police ordered to take part in the police operation of the 24th of June who participated in the events which are the object of the present penal action and who it will be possible to identify by means of this brief.

 The members of the National Police ordered to form part of the Riot Squads (UIP) who participated in the events which are the object of the present penal action and who will have to be identified in the course of the present action

The domicile of the defendants is that of the Delegation of the Government in Barcelona.IV

The sequence of events which gave rise to this action is the following:

A) BACKGROUND TO THE EVENTS

At the beginning of January the World Bank announced the 3rd European Annual Conference on Development, to be held in the city of Barcelona. In response to this, more than 350 incorporated bodies, collectives and political parties began to organise a campaign (called the Campaign against the World Bank, Barcelona 2001) to protest publicly and to express their alternatives to the neoliberal politics pursued by that institution. Within the framework of this Campaign, a unified demonstration, of expressly peaceful, mass and festive type, was organised for the 24th of June 2001 (documents file 4).

From that moment on, and parallel to the campaign, the organisers denounced what they considered to be a government and police campaign of persecution and smears against them, with more than 1324 cases of people being stopped and identified, homes searched, telephones tapped, people stopped and searched at the borders, people being followed and intimidation by the police (documents file 11).

The Delegate of the Government, Sra. Júlia García Valdecasas, like other leaders of the Popular Party, alleged, in public declarations, connections and collaboration between members of the Campaign and other organisations, including a link to the radical nationalist Basque left, with no basis and with the aim of criminalising the participating social movements (see documents file 11).

On the 19th of June the government authority banned – outside of the legal time limit – the demonstration planned for the 24th of June and announced publicly that the demonstration would be repressed by the police (see documents file 11).

The extempore banning of the demonstration and the public threat to repress it from the beginning, along with the smear campaign (see documents file 5) against the organisers, created a certain alarm in society.

The organisers appealed the government decision to the High Court of Catalonia, which, prior to an urgent summons to both parties to present themselves, issued a resolution on the 23rd of June (the day before the demonstration), upholding the appeal against the ban, on the grounds, among other reasons, that the ban could “produce effects contrary to those intended” (see documents file 6).

The resolution was interpreted by the media as a political discrediting of Sra. Valdecasas, to the point that certain sectors of Catalan society called for her resignation (see documents file 1, p. 19).

In this tense context, the organisers of the demonstration of the campaign Barcelona 2001 were very much aware that any hypothetical incidents would justify the previous government decision and benefit the police arguments defended by Sra. Valdecasas in the public controversy about the activities of the Campaign. For this reason, the organisers redoubled their organisational efforts to avoid any situation of provocation or violent confrontation during the course of the demonstration.

I) AN OVERALL EVALUATION OF THE EVENTS

The events refered to, which form part of a police action which was anomalous, irregular, and in many aspects criminal, can hardly have been the result of the personal initiative of certain police(wo)men or of medium ranking officers Everything suggests that, because of the importance given to the demonstratation by the Delegation of the Government, as evidenced by the enormous and disproportionate deployment of police for the event, it is unthinkable that the police action might have been improvised. As well as the strategic deployment of the security forces, perfectly studied and calculated, the behaviour of the police in response to the incidents, which were perfectly foreseeable, must necessarily have been just as planned and subject to concrete orders from above. The presence of persons, masked and wearing clothes appropriate to violent groups, and carrying iron bars and clearly in dialogue with the police force, cannot have been casual nor improvised. It must form part of a perfectly planned strategy. The Delegation of the Government itself recognises the camouflaging of police(wo)men as an appropriate tactic for the identification and detention of persons with violent attitudes. What is totally inacceptable is that the camouflage should permit them to act masked to carry out the same actions which they claim to want to prevent. Thus it is difficult to distinguish between that which constitutes a criminal act of prevention and that which might constitute a provocation and direct participation in the criminal action.

The passivity of the numerous members of the security forces in response to the damage to private properties in Passeig de Gràcia which certain perfectly characterised persons committed is also completely unjustifiable. If this attitude was contrary to orders received, the Delegation of the Government should have started disciplinary proceedings, which we are unaware of, in fact, quite the contrary is the case; the Delegation has defended this behaviour justifying the passivity on the grounds of it being inappropriate to use violence against peaceful demonstrators. The fact is that the violent acts were happening a good number of metres away from the demonstration and after it had passed. It is also inexplicable why it should be necessary to use force against the demonstrators in order to arrest persons carrying out acts away from the demonstration and supposedly under the surveillance of “camouflaged” police(wo)men.

These scruples are completely shown up by the actions of the police in breaking up the demonstration with extreme and brutal violence when it arrived at Plaça Catalunya.

What do not cease to surprise, on the other hand, is the high degree to which the damage foreseen by the Delegation of the Government in the document presented to the High Court coincides with that caused by a violent minority among which the presence of “camouflaged police(wo)men” has been confirmed, and this despite the confirmed attitude of the demonstrators against violent acts. It must be taken into account that, according to the police report, the organisers took all the measures they could to prevent violent acts, and the demonstration was definitely peaceful. The violence was separate from the demonstration and could have been avoided and repressed without interfering with the course of the latter. What is more, the police had the duty to prevent violence precisely in order to preserve the right to demonstrate which thousands of people were exercising.

In conclusion, all the government actions, prior to and on the day of the demonstration of the 24th of June, and which may be centred around three significant moments: the prior banning with the intention of provoking an illegal demonstration, police inaction in the face of perfectly avoidable acts of vandalism, and the participation of police agents provocateurs in the violent incidents, seem to add up to a political strategy, of which Sra. Julia García Valdecasas has been the perpetrator, with the intention of criminalising the groups participating in the “Campaign against the World Bank, Barcelona 2001” and the social movements in general, and to discredit them in the eyes of public opinion, reducing them to a violent minority, explicitly linked to the so-called “low intensity terrorism”. This was the argument of the document presented to the High Court by the Sub-delegation of the Government in Barcelona, and which the events were supposed to corroborate.

The events outlined in Annex B) would constitute the crime of damage under Art. 514.3 in relation to Art. 263 of the Penal Code.

The events outlined in Annex C) would constitute the crime of injury under Article 147 of the Penal Code with aggravation under Article 22.7 and 22.2.

The events outlined in Annex D) would constitute the crime of illegal detention under Article 167 of the Penal Code, without prejudice ot the result of the corresponding judicial action in the case currently before Barcelona District Court No. 33.

The events outlined in Annex E) would constitute crimes against the exercise of civil rights covered by Articles 540 and 542 of the Penal Code and the crime committed within the framework of the exercise of the fundamental rights covered by Article 514.4

The events outlined in Annex F) would constitute crimes against the exercise of civil rights covered by Article 542 of the Penal Code and of suppression of Art. 172 in the application of Article 77.1 and 2.

The events outlined in Annex G) would constitute the crime of neglect of the duty to combat crimes under Art. 408 of the Penal Code.

The events outlined in Annex H) would constitute the crime of suppression of Art. 172 of the Penal Code.

The events outlined in Annex A) and I) would constitute crimes against the exercise of civil rights covered by Article 542 and the crime committed within the framework of the exercise of the fundamental rights covered by Article 514.4 of the Penal Code.

arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)