The law on the exchange of criminal recordswhich will allow ETA prisoners to deduct the sentences they have served in France and thus bring forward their release from prison, comes into force this Friday.
As published in the Official State Gazette (BOE) on October 19, the rule, which transposes a European directive and provoked a strong confrontation between Government and opposition, enters into force now, so that several terrorists will be able to accumulate the sentences served in a European country and count them in order to get out of prison earlier.
The support network for ETA prisoners, Sare, has calculated that 52 ETA prisoners will be able to benefit from the legal reform, of whom seven could be released from prison before the end of the year.
140 ETA prisoners
According to their data, there are currently 140 ETA prisoners in Basque and Navarre prisons.in different regimes, plus another 4 in France. There will be 52 ETA prisoners, 48 in prisons in the Basque Country and Navarre and 4 in France, who will be able to benefit from the new rule, although each prisoner will have, through his lawyer, to request before the condemning court, in Spain, the Audiencia Nacional, that the law be applied to them in order to be able to leave prison earlier.
This would not be the case of former ETA chief Francisco Javier García Gaztelu, Txapote. In 2014, the Audiencia Nacional already took into account the sentence imposed by a French court when accumulating his convictions, so that it is foreseeable that this legal reform would not imply his early release from prison.
Tough confrontation between government and opposition
The approval of this law provoked a fierce confrontation between the Government and the opposition. It was the Association of Victims of Terrorism (AVT) that warned that the law contained an amendment, introduced during its passage through Congress by Sumar, which deleted an article and the additional provision that prevented, until now, that ETA convicts could deduct the sentences they have served in France.
The text, with said amendment, was debated and approved unanimously in Congress and passed through the Senate without any group introducing vetoes or amendments.
The PP accused the Executive of including this amendment “by stealth” and affirmed that it supported the text by mistake, while the Executive defended that the PP knew what it was voting for and that the text is the same as the one approved by the Government of Mariano Rajoy in 2014..