The Provincial Court of Madrid has definitively closed the criminal case opened against the company Sanoma for the provisional edition of a textbook that was never distributed in schools. This publication, titled History of the Contemporary World, He alluded to Vox, according to the complaint, as a far-right party heir to Nazism. filed a complaint for libel, slander and an alleged hate crime against the publishing company and two of its directors.
The Prosecutor’s Office appealed the judge’s decision to continue with the investigation of an open case against a book “that had not gone on sale, where there were no direct references to Vox nor was it classified as a Nazi party, nor was it intended to discredit it.” . In addition, it detailed how the final version of the text was titled “the radical right in Europe, a phenomenon on the rise” and the only reference to Vox was “a map with the results of the extreme right parties in their respective national parliaments.” During the investigation, the instructor even claimed the contract signed with the author of the text, who had died, and the benefits obtained from the publication, which was never sold.
The Provincial Court of Madrid has now decided to archive the proceedings opened by Peinado, who prolonged his criminal investigation against the publisher for more than two years after admitting the Vox complaint to processing. The three magistrates who have shelved this judicial procedure remind the instructor that it is not possible to accuse legal entities, in this case the publishing firm, of the crime of libel and slander attributed to them by Vox. “The catalog of crimes that generate criminal liability for legal entities in Spanish law is forty-one, among which are not the crimes of libel and slander,” states the order of the Provincial Court. The case could only remain open against natural persons, but the resolution recalls that this requires a prior conciliation act with those responsible for the company and that act was never held.
Vox also denounced a hate crime in the content of the book, but the Provincial Court reminds the far-right party that this crime “has the essence of publicly inciting hatred, hostility, discrimination or violence against a group, a part of the group or against a specific person, but attacked because of their membership, for racist, anti-Semitic or other reasons related to ideology, religion or beliefs, family situation, the belonging of its members to an ethnic group, race or nation, their origin national, their sex, sexual orientation or identity, for reasons of gender, illness or disability (…)”. But that “such groups [que pueden ser víctimas del delito de odio] They are not, in principle, political parties.”
The Supreme Court also dismissed a similar complaint by Vox against Podemos leaders who, during a rally, referred to far-right party politicians as “uncovered Nazis.” “Hate speech, for it to be criminal, is directed at certain social groups that are in this way vilified, objectified, harassed and subject to a risk, at least potential, of physical aggression, in many cases seeking their disappearance or eradication.” ”says the Supreme Court ruling. The reporting magistrate, Julián Sánchez Melgar, then argued why the hate crime did not fit into the facts that Vox denounced. “Hate crime defends these social minorities, but not other groups, as is the case of political parties, whose most natural accommodation resides in crimes against honor, as long as their requirements, highly nuanced by our jurisprudence, are met. in the context of electoral campaigns and with the protection, on other occasions, of the parliamentary prerogative of inviolability.”
The investigator of the case now filed by the Provincial Court is Juan Carlos Peinado, the same judge who keeps Begoña Gómez, wife of the President of the Government, prosecuted for four crimes – influence peddling, corruption in business, professional intrusion and misappropriation. Pedro Sánchez. Peinado has not obtained eight months of instruction nor a single clue about the crimes he is investigating, quite the contrary. Despite this lack of evidence, this judge continues with the open criminal case and has added three new defendants to the judicial procedure: the businessman Juan Carlos Barrabés, the rector of the Complutense, Ignacio Goyache, and the former PP politician and IE director Juan José Güemes.
