18/98
Case
:: Judgement for
the Case 18/98 ::
Hundreds of years of business, social, political
and cultural activities
The sentence concerning case 18/98 was at last
notified by the Audiencia Nacional on December
19th 2007after the press had published a good
part of its content. By order of the aforesaid
sentence have been outlawed and disbanded several
political, social and business activities such
as the newspaper Egin , the radio station Egin
Irratia, the political organization Ekin, European
association for international solidarity and the
foundation for the promotion of associations and
Basque association Joxemi Zumalabe. Moreover 47
persons were condemned for their status as members
of the aforementioned companies and associations
to sentences totalling 525 years imprisonment
for allegedly being officers or employees of the
terrorist organization ETA.
In addition
to presenting entire paragraphs of police reports,
the sentence is fraught with apriorisms, prejudices,
twisted and interested interpretations to justify
the conclusion, close to Garzon’s, that
“everything is ETA”. “Kas, Ekin,
Xaki do not constitute an armed organization,
they have no weapons since they do not need them
in their work as it is the case of the armed wing
of ETA. These structures, however, are fully involved
in the structural and organizational unit of the
terrorist organization ETA. The highest penalties
have fallen on the defendants in relation with
the companies in the group Orain (Publishers of
Egin). The Court tries to justify its decision
linking the activities to edit a newspaper with
the ones intending to circumvent the economic
suffocation to which it was being subjected, with
a purported dependence to ETA. The rapporteur
of the sentence, Angela Murillo, says that she
does not need evidence to support this allegation:
“one has only to know to read”.
International
observers have already made public that this ruling
“means the normalization of a judicial culture
of exception or emergency which establishes diffuse
and collective criminal liability, absolutely
incompatible with the democratic system”.
So for them the sentence “is situated in
a more global, long-term strategy of criminalization
of the exercise of the right of opinion, assembly
and demonstration, inter-alias of an important
sector of Basque society.
Index
of the Judgemente for the Case 18/98 (in Spanish)
Judgemente
for the Case 18/98 (in Spanish, pdf version)
Judgemente
for the Case 18/98 (in Spanish, word version)
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