ERC and Junts have presented this Tuesday amendments to the amnesty law that is being processed in Congress and the main request of both returns to one of the paragraphs that at the time was most difficult to negotiate. The pro-independence parties want the law to go forward without the paragraph that excludes crimes classified as terrorism, so that the amnesty can also reach those convicted of these causes, since both parties consider that this is the way to amnesty those accused in the case of the CDR and the Democratic Tsunami.
These amendments are the intention of ERC and Junts, but they have not been agreed with the Government parties, PSOE and Sumar, which have nevertheless registered their own proposals for changes to the law together with other coalition partners, such as EH Bildu, the Mixed group, and even ERC, which supports the joint groups even though it has also presented its own amendments.
The amendments of the Government and its partners are of an eminently technical nature. Despite this, Junts has dropped the joint document to adhere only to its own requests. In addition to the issue of terrorism, Jordi Turull’s party demands that the temporal scope of applicability of the law begin in November 2011 (initially it was January 2012) and also that judges cannot suspend the application of the rule even with a preliminary ruling to the Court of Justice of the European Union.
In this sense, ERC also includes in the four amendments that have registered a modification so that a preliminary ruling to the European Court of Justice (CJEU) is sufficient to lift precautionary measures in a procedure, instead of requiring, as until now, a question of unconstitutionality. In addition, they ask to eliminate the threshold of severity that is established in the exclusion of torture and degrading treatment. For the pro-independence party, “subjecting the exclusion of these acts to a threshold of seriousness gives the judges an excessive margin of interpretation.”
Esquerra also proposes in the amendments presented alone some modifications of less relevance or of a more technical nature. They propose, for example, that there be a single exception to the restitution of money paid in fines (in the original there was none): when they have been imposed under the Citizen Security Law, known as the ‘gag law’. The justification provided in the document registered this Tuesday is that “it is a decision of an economic nature that is perfectly reversible and that will allow the affected person or entity to be restored to the situation prior to the imposition of sanctions.”
Source: www.eldiario.es
