More than eight years have passed since a group of far-right attackers entered the Blanquerna bookshop in Madrid while the celebrations to mark Catalonia's National Day were underway. It was September 11th, 2013 when more than a dozen people with pre-constitutional Spanish flags stormed violently into the Blanquerna centre's conference room, part of the Catalan government's delegation in Madrid, and assaulted some of those present. Luckily, the injuries were only minor and the material damage they carried out was repaired a few days later. But those images of hardcore members of Spanish fascist groups Falange and Alianza Nacional, seen years later, still transmit a hatred and violence that makes one's hair stand on end.
Well, section 30 of Madrid's Provincial Audience Court has finally issued its ruling for ten of the fourteen people convicted for those actions and their entry into prison will take place in the first fortnight of December. After the bizarre, inexplicable and shameful judicial journey of their case, they will enter the penitentiary of their choice, where they will have to face a sentence that has been substantially reduced, so that they now have to serve somewhere between 2 years and 7 months and 2 years and 9 months in prison, with their crime now defined as a simple offence of public disorder.
So far, none of them have spent a single night in jail despite the Supreme Court originally sentencing them to up to four years in prison by adding to the public disorder offence an aggravating factor of ideological discrimination. The Constitutional Court did not accept that judgment and ordered a retrial. In recent years, things have happened that are so sui generis that two of the defendants were even able to run in the last elections to the Madrid Assembly even though they had already been given a final sentence.
This favourable treatment - how else could you classify all the time elapsed since the events of 2013? - is even more scandalous when compared to the judicial events that have taken place in Catalonia in recent years. Without going any further, those convicted for the events of October 1st, 2017, with sentences totalling a hundred years in prison among them all - and all this while the Blanquerna extremists were at large and their case was ticking over at a clearly different rate, one that was exasperatingly slow - spent four years in prison and were only able to obtain provisional release thanks to the partial pardon that was granted.
Obviously, it is very difficult not to see that behind the judicial obstacles lies an approach that is different - significantly so. In fact, under normal conditions, we would say that this case has finally reached its end and this time there will be no more delays. But nothing would be surprising anymore after all we have seen during these years.