The Paris appeal court began judging this Thursday. The trial, which is being held six months later than expected due to various defense allegations, is the last one the former ETA leader has pending in France and which conditions his surrender to Spain for the cases pending there. The hearings will be held this Thursday and Friday, when the prosecutor’s sentencing request is expected. But beyond their result, they will mark the judicial future in Spain of Ternera, currently on probation in France. Until this process is resolved, including the Supreme Court in case of conviction and new appeal, the euro orders for his extradition will not be effective.
—Do you recognize the facts? —the judge asked in her first question to Ternera.
—Yes, as a member of the organization. But what you consider a crime, for me it is not.
The process, which must determine his membership in the terrorist group ETA from 2002 to 2005, has been postponed for several years. The last time was last October, when Urrutikoetxea, 75, cited health problems to be absent. The doctor appointed by the court then confirmed that he had hypertension problems. This time he will go forward and, as soon as he started, Ternera introduced the key nuance in his first words on which his defense hinges. That is to say, he was a member of said organization, but he neither led it at that time nor opted for the path of violence. “I have worked all my life in the international apparatus. I had an important role. But a large part of my period as a militant was in that context of discussion with others. I did not have any important role,” he said.
The judge, who heard how Ternera denounced the torture of the Spanish police or the “constructed” stories of the judges in other processes, was surprised that someone without a relevant role could participate in peace negotiations with the Spanish government. “There are many conflict negotiators who are not even militants,” defended Ternera, who, at the request of the court, outlined his entire career in the terrorist organization, from his entry in 1968, at the age of 17, until 2006, when he claimed to have resigned due to his disagreements over the use of violence. “There was a time when the organization did not share my point of view on the negotiation. In September 2006 I stopped being a member of the organization. We did not see things the same.”
Urrutikoetxea’s lawyer, Pasquet-Marinacce, tried again on Thursday to suspend the trial, alleging that the Northern Irish politician and former member of the IRA Gerry Kelly, or the South African lawyer Brian Currin, involved among others in the peace process that ended the apartheid in your country. Both participated in the dialogue for the disarmament of ETA as international mediators and had been requested by the defense. “We cannot accept that we are deprived of defending ourselves effectively,” he alleged. After deliberation, the court found no reason to do so.
The accused had arrived on time accompanied by family members – such as his partner and his young daughter – and his lawyers to the last pending trial in France, on which it depends whether he can later answer before the Spanish justice system for two cases on which there are euro orders issued: , in which 11 people were murdered. Also for the financing of ETA through the town bars. Those two requests for delivery to Spain have already been approved by France. Until this process is resolved and all avenues are exhausted – there would still be a recourse to the equivalent of the French Supreme Court – the Euro-orders cannot be executed.
Ternera, in fact, denied at trial that he had “anything to do” with the Zaragoza attack. Urrutikoetxea confronted the prosecutor when she brought up those accusations and contrasted them with the image that the band’s history tried to give, that of someone who throughout his career in ETA had the objective of seeking negotiation with the Spanish authorities to “resolve the Basque conflict.”
The ETA disavowed these accusations. [El entonces juez de la Audiencia Nacional Baltasar] “Garzón tried to implicate me in that attack and in 2001 the Civil Guard set up this matter again,” he said. For this reason he decided to “go underground” because even in the Basque Parliament he was described as “a murderer before being tried.”
Josu Ternera, in fact, fled Spain when he was being investigated for the attack on the Zaragoza barracks and lives in the French Basque Country. The Prosecutor’s Office considered that he was the one who made the decision to commit this attack and was called to testify, but he did not appear, so an international search and arrest warrant was issued. Yesterday
The trial that started today and has nothing to do with these events—both the judge and the prosecutor demonstrated that they were not very aware of the biographical and historical details of the defendant’s terrorist organization—has been successively postponed. In 2010 he was already sentenced to seven years in prison, so he did not serve the sentence. When he was arrested in the French Alps in 2019 after more than 17 consecutive years of hiding, he requested that the trial be repeated in his presence, based on his right to do so.
The historic ETA member was released under judicial control a year later, for health reasons, despite the fact that Spain had requested his extradition. The trial was going to be held in 2021, but the defense managed to return the case to the investigation phase, citing formal issues, and then it has been delayed.
During his years of hiding, the French justice system opened a second case against him, but that was resolved on September 1, 2021, when the Paris Correctional Court acquitted him of the accusation of belonging to a terrorist organization between 2011 and 2013, considering that he did not have a role as such within ETA in those years. Ternera then alleged that he had left the terrorist organization because he did not agree with armed action.
