According to what we have been told, Joe Biden came to Madrid to the NATO summit and met with Pedro Sánchez in order to seek, among other things, greater involvement from Spain, both economically and militarily, in the needs of the Atlantic Alliance, and one of the measures already agreed upon will be an enlarged US military presence at the base in Rota. War is expensive and the Russian aggression in Ukraine will last longer than we are being told, as it is better to drip feed the official information and better still after the summer, so as to avoid spoiling the summer tourist campaign now, in addition to the black clouds that will be seen when we come back from holidays. No one better than Sánchez to understand this, a prime minister who switched, in just a few years and without any transition, from proposing the abolition of the Spanish defence ministry in 2014 to defending more budget allocation in the next public accounts. Which ministry is surplus to requirements and which one lacks funding? they newspaper El Mundo asked and he replied: "More budget is required against poverty, gender violence... And what we need less of is the ministry of defence." Just like that.
War has many faces and while a naive or thoughtless Pedro Sánchez was pretending to be a pacifist, that same year, in 2014, the newspaper La Razón published on its front page the photograph of the Spanish ID numbers of 33 judges who had spoken out in favour of Catalonia's "right to decide" - that is, to be independent or not. The headline could not have been more striking and illustrative of the goal that was pursuing: "The conspiracy of the 33 sovereignist judges." It was a way of outing them and putting them in the accusatory cross-hairs: they were pro-independence judges, of course. Trying to put an end to their careers and have them marginalized by the judiciary for expressing this view. So that they would receive a civil punishment and be taught a lesson. Because it’s always the same: give them a scare and teach them a lesson. A couple of weeks ago we learned of the recordings of conversations between Alicia Sánchez-Camacho and commissioner Villarejo on the investigation of a number of people and attempts to remove them from office, including the current Catalan economy minister, Jaume Giró, who has filed a complaint and the public prosecutors have admitted it.
That news from La Razón not only caused a great stir, but also had enormous consequences for those affected, who saw how their privacy violated through the publication of their ID numbers, which could not have taken place without the complicity of the government of the time. This Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) condemned the Spanish government for publishing the photo of the ID cards in La Razón. It is a ruling for which there are no palliatives, and it is one more, if you will, for a country that has come to care very little about being found guilty by European justice. In fact, I suppose, it has become something like a badge of patriotism in the closed Spanish judicial world.
It is worth highlighting the judicial journey undergone in Spain by the complaint that was presented: first the plaintiffs lodged a complaint to a Madrid court that was rejected on the grounds that police leaks were a criminal offence, but could not be attributed to a specific person. The defendants went up a rung, to the Madrid Audience, and the result was also negative, because it decided against the admission of the complaint. With the doors closed in Spain, about twenty of those affected decided to file a lawsuit with the ECHR in 2017 and the result is what we have seen: another slap on the hand for the Spanish government and, therefore, someone should in Spanish justice should be very embarrassed.
It would be good if Biden also knew about this persecution of the Catalan independence movement from its origins, since we are talking about the years 2012 and 2014, when the independence process was not yet even structured as such. Because when it comes to that war, it is certain that Pedro Sánchez didn't say anything.