Individual reports:

Days 19-20/12/2005

Report Nº 10

Silke Studzinsky,
lawyer in Berlin, member of the German Lawyers Association


Observer mission to the trial of Case 18/98

The trial is being conducted in a building, away from the main Audiencia Nacional building, in Madrid. It is a new building, surrounded by large roads, in an inhospitable and closely watched part of the Casa de Campo Park.

This report is about the 13 th and 14 th days of the oral hearing. Up to this point, 15 of the defendants have been cross-examined; they have been constantly interrupted by the chair of the Tribunal when they tried to explain the reasons why they would only answer the questions posed by the defence (which were related to the political nature of the trial). The attitude of the Tribunal is blatantly aggressive.

The oral hearings are running for much longer than foreseen, because there are constant reasons for adjournments. None of the sessions began punctually. The lunchtime break lasts for at least 3 hours.

There Tribunal conducts fruitless searches for pieces of evidence and there is point-blank dismissal of objections raised by the defence.

On Monday morning, news arrived that nine of the defendants had had a road accident on their way to the Audiencia Nacional and were in hospital having treatment. The oral hearing was int6errupted until the afternoon and, after the reports from the hospital and the Audiencia Nacional doctors were read out, the injured defendants were exempted form attending the trial until January 9.

All the defendants have to attend all the hearings, even when the procedural moment does not affect them. This means that every week 56 people have to spend 3 nights in Madrid. If we analyse this from a statistical point of view, we can see that there is a high probability that the defendants will be involved in traffic accidents throughout the trial; let alone the immense economic cost of travelling to Madrid every week that the defendants are facing.

Right from the beginning, the defence requested the defendants only be obliged to attend those sessions dealing with the part of the macro-case affecting them; but the Tribunal has dismissed this request. This decision has no objective basis, and seems to be a form of added punishment.

Irregularities continue to occur

Once again, documents are being incorrectly translated.

The defendants state many of the pieces of evidence referring to them are not theirs, they had no knowledge of these documents. Even the computers where the said documents were allegedly found do not work, so the evidence cannot be classified.

Other pieces of documentary evidence cannot be found. It seems nobody knows where they are.

All the defendants have declared they have nothing to do with ETA and they have no connection to the said organisation. However, the evidence and documents brought forward cannot substantiate this alleged membership or connection.

The judicial secretary was substituted due to “requirements of her work”. The defence raised an objection regarding the lack of a proper explanation, but this objection was also dismissed.

New documents come to light

500 folders with at least 150,000 pages which had, until now, been secret came to light. These are part of a set of proceedings initiated by judge Garzón in 1989; their content was unknown to the defence, despite the fact that they had insistently requested access to them over a number of years. Even the Chair of the Tribunal seemed surprised at the enormous pile of documents. Nevertheless, the trial was not adjourned to allow the defence to study these documents.

The defence will be allowed to study this enormous amount of documents (to which they had been denied access until now) only on certain days and at certain times, set by the Tribunal. Needless to say, they will have to travel to Madrid to do so and they have the time limit of January 9, when the oral hearings are set to resume. It is absolutely impossible to adequately study these documents in such a short period. In this trial, it is completely impossible to talk of any kind of equality of instruments in law.

The process could be described as a theatre of the absurd, with kafkaesque scenes, if it were not such a serious process involving such long jail sentences.