"You can donate a kidney for free, but not in exchange for a price": the author of this strange reference is none other than the interim president of Spain's General Council of Judiciary (CGPJ), Vicente Guilarte, and he is not, however likely it might seem, referring to a medical case where someone has paid for a transplant or to the illegal sale of organs. The intention is much more complicated and the Bilbao lawyer, who is also professor of Civil Law at the University of Valladolid, has employed it to refer to the amnesty bill, asserting that it is inappropriate to combine a measure of grace of this type with an exchange of benefits.
He also affirms that obtaining mutual benefits undermines its nature as a political action which is gratuitous, that is to say, free. We have known from the beginning that the opposition to the amnesty is practically total on the part of the judiciary, who are accompanied by the right wings of politics, economics and finance, media and society. We also know equally well that the PSOE would not have tolerated carrying it out if it had not been forced to by the electoral arithmetic. The pro-independence votes were essential for Pedro Sánchez to continue in government, since the numbers did not work out via any of the other arithmetical combinations.
The amnesty is also an acknowledgment of the guilt of the state, on the part of those who made use of police violence and the excesses of the courts
Having said all this, it is difficult to find amnesties from which one cannot conclude that one side ended up winning. Spain's amnesty of 1977, approved by the Spanish houses of parliament, in addition to leaving without effect all the cases that had been launched by the Franco-era courts for rebellion or sedition, against freedoms and against hundreds of people for political crimes, also prevented the crimes of the dictatorship from being tried because it imposed the criterion of pardoning everyone, with total impunity. It was done as a gesture to Spanish democrats, but they weren't the only ones to get that treatment.
That is not very different from what is currently being processed in Congress and the Senate. There are beneficiaries on both sides, although some are the aggrieved and others the aggressors. The voters in Catalonia's referendum of 1st October 2017 were assaulted by the police, and not the other way around. I know that it is not seen that way from the judiciary and the Spanish police. Neither by the CGPJ, nor its provisional president, Mr Guilarte. But if the Catalan independence movement approves of the amnesty law by a very large majority, it is because it is also an acknowledgment of the guilt of the state, on the part of those who made use of police violence and the excesses of the courts.
Such a reading is not acceptable in the capital of the kingdom of Spain, but it is what the PSOE and the Spanish left end up making. The votes of the MPs exist, of course. But it is the fact of being corrected that is irritating and intolerable to many sectors of Spanish politics, the judiciary and the media.