Friday, March 29

Justice buries a Vox complaint against Monedero for comparing them to the Nazis

The Provincial Court of Madrid has rejected Vox’s request to investigate Juan Carlos Monedero for comparing the party with Nazism or with the hitmen of the Medellín cartel. The judges, in a resolution advanced by The Newspaper of Spain and that elDiario.es has been able to examine, they understand that the former leader of Podemos did not attribute any crime to the far-right formation and that he did not promote hatred against Santiago Abascal’s party either. The judges explain that, at this point, even the Supreme Court has established sufficient case law on Vox’s complaints to political rivals for hate crimes in similar cases with Pablo Echenique or Ione Belarra.

The statements that the Justice has studied were made by Juan Carlos Monedero in a video on his Twitter account, where he currently has more than 600,000 followers. Expressions in which he compared the far-right party with Nazism or with a drug cartel: “You are a Nazi (…) you act like the murderers of Medellín (…) they lack humanity, a particular swamp, filth (… .) the idols of Vox ended up in Nuremberg,” said the professor and founding member of Podemos in the video shared on his social media profiles.

Court 16 of Madrid decided to file the case in July of last year on the understanding that Monedero had not incurred in any of the crimes attributed to him by the formation of Santiago Abascal: neither a hate crime, nor insults, nor slander. Now it is the Provincial Court of Madrid that, with the support of the Prosecutor’s Office, rejects Vox’s appeal and definitively buries the complaint. For the judges, it is clear that Monedero did not impute any type of crime to the party and that it did not promote hatred against its members or voters.

The Court flatly rejects the first two accusations. “In relation to the crime of slander, no crime is imputed to the VOX political party, no matter how unfortunate the expressions made are,” he says, later also rejecting that comparing Vox with Nazism could mean a crime of insults. It is at this point that the judges turn to the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court and explain that the second chamber has already been able to create “repeated jurisprudence” on this matter as a result of the failed Vox complaints.

They recall that in the last year the Supreme Court has inadmissible Vox complaints against deputy Pablo Echenique and against Minister Ione Belarra for linking Santiago Abascal’s party with Nazism. As explained by elDiario.es, Vox has achieved resounding victories in the Constitutional Court in its fight against the measures taken by the Government to alleviate the pandemic, but has reaped a greater number of defeats through criminal and contentious-administrative proceedings.

The Provincial Court of Madrid does not find a hate crime in these statements either, another illicit that the party usually puts on the judges’ table when it sues against political rivals. Monedero’s statements, they reiterate, are not criminal: “They do not incite hostility or violence to achieve political objectives, nor do their expressions constitute manifestations of hate speech, which could encourage a situation of risk for people or the rights of third parties or for the system of liberties itself, makes an unfortunate criticism as argued by the contested order”, say the judges to definitively reject Vox’s appeal.



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