The general secretary of Podemos, Ione Belarra, and the retired judge Manuel García Castellón will face each other in a trial that will be held at 12:00 on June 23 in the Madrid courts. The reason is for calling him “corrupt” and prevaricator, words for which he demands 240,000 euros.
“Today the BOE publishes the forced retirement of Judge García Castellón. We said it months ago and now it is confirmed, this and other corrupt judges, who have prevaricated against those of us who defend another idea of Spain, are going to get away without any sanction thanks to the PSOE. Shame,” wrote the purple leader on her national deputy.
In his lawsuit, García Castellón alleged that his right to honor had been violated because there was no doubt that the expressions used by Belarra “lack a legitimate general interest and are outrageous and offensive.” Furthermore, he recalled that the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court has already established that freedom of expression, “although it has a broad scope of protection, is not unlimited.” Belarra, for her part, publicly defended that the qualifiers are protected by the parliamentary freedom conferred on her by her status as a member of the Congress of Deputies. The Prosecutor’s Office sided with García Castellón, understanding that the qualifiers used by Belarra against the retired judge are “clearly offensive and unnecessary,” although it advocated reducing the compensation from 240,000 to 20,000 euros.
The Supreme Court, after holding a prior hearing to hear the parties, decided that it was not the competent court to issue a ruling because it interpreted that Belarra’s demonstrations were related to her activity “as a political leader and deputy” but that she did not make them “properly in the exercise of her position” in the Lower House. The Civil Chamber explained that Belarra’s “disqualifications” were made on a social network, without connection with a parliamentary act, although in her messages from “This simple mention contained in the social network message cannot be considered the reproduction of a parliamentary act nor does it denote the direct relationship, which is manifestly imposed, between the opinion expressed and parliamentary functions,” the high court ruled.
The former minister criticized that the Supreme Court “removed itself” from the matter, denying her the “parliamentary inviolability” that she believes protects her. “They call it Justice because reactionism was very long,” he wrote again in X.
After disposing of the case, the Supreme Court left it in the hands of García Castellón to pursue it before the competent courts. And so he did, giving continuity to this lawsuit for the right to honor, which has ended up in the Court of First Instance Number 45 of Madrid. This Tuesday a prior hearing was held where the case should have been heard for sentencing but Belarra has requested as a novelty – she did not propose it in the Supreme Court – that García Castellón himself appear as a witness, which has forced a trial date to be set. Legal sources consulted by EL PAÍS point out that the oral hearing has been scheduled for 12:00 p.m. on June 23 at that same courthouse.
