“Acato”, the Vox MEP Hermann Tertsch has tweeted in a message in which he attaches screenshots of the ruling that sentenced him in 2019 to compensate the father of former Vice President Pablo Iglesias with 15,000 euros. In that year, the journalist said that the father of the former leader of Podemos was arrested for the death of a police officer in 1973 and that he covered up the perpetrators of the crime, accusations that the Justice has considered an “obvious injury to the honor” of Francisco Javier Churches.
The sentence not only forces him to compensate the family for a crime of illegitimate interference and violation of the right to honor, but also urges Tertsch to publish the resolution on his social network. “I condemn the defendant to issue and publish at his own expense the decision of this sentence through its publication on his Twitter account”, collects the document of the Court of First Instance and Instruction Number 2 of Zamora.
I abide. pic.twitter.com/jJFMRkxSTC
— Hermann Tertsch (@hermanntertsch) March 17, 2022
In addition, the judge orders the far-right MEP “to remove, at his own expense, from his Twitter account and from Internet search engines, in particular Google and Yahoo, and from the cache of the corresponding web pages” the “injurious” messages that published about the father of Pablo Iglesias:
- “Nobody remembers the name of this policeman either. José Antonio Fernández Gutiérrez assassinated by the FRAP, a communist terrorist group, on May 1, 1973. Among the members arrested later was the father of Pablo Iglesias. As the amnesty came, no one was ever charged”.
- “Decisions about killing or not killing police officers are made beforehand. In addition, I have not said that Iglesias’s father was one of the material authors of the murder of that 21-year-old policeman. But he didn’t help clear it up. That crime was never clarified because the amnesty was granted.”
Tertsch has more than 290,000 followers on Twitter, so these messages, according to the magistrate, are “susceptible” of being “spread through social networks, even being published in some digital newspaper.” These tweets were “an obvious injury to the plaintiff’s honor”, despite the fact that there is “no evidence that the actor carried out other acts than to publicize the call for a demonstration in which a police officer was killed”. That is, for the judge the messages were not intended to “simply inform” because it is not proven that the father participated in the murder.
Along with compensation, Tertsch must pay “all the legal costs” as well as refrain from “any activity that violates the plaintiff’s right to honor, as well as interference with his right to privacy.” Meanwhile, Pablo Iglesias has celebrated the sentence. “I hope justice continues to be done with these cowards who, to harm me and my party, attacked my family,” he said on former leader of Podemos on Twitter.
It is not the first time that the Vox columnist must explain to Justice for violating the honor of the Iglesias family. Already in July 2017, a court in Zamora convicted him for saying in an article in the ABC newspaper that the grandfather of the former vice president of the Government “was sentenced to death for participating in sacks, that is, in the hunt for innocent unarmed civilians in the rear in Madrid ”.
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