Congress has taken this Tuesday the first step to open an investigation into the sexual abuse of minors within the Church. The majority of the Chamber Table has admitted for processing the request for the creation of that commission presented by United We Can, ERC and EH Bildu, against the opposition of the PP and Vox. The PSOE has supported the initiative, after the lawyers have not issued any unfavorable report and have asked to accept said request so that the Board of Spokespersons is the one that eventually decides to include it on the agenda of an upcoming plenary session. The Socialists have not yet decided whether the commission will be a parliamentary investigation, about which they have some misgivings, or experts, as the PNV proposes. That decision will more than likely be made at a Board of Spokespersons on February 15, two days after the regional elections in Castilla y León.
At the meeting of the Congress Table, the majority formed by the six members of the PSOE (three with the president) and United We Can (three other components) has prevailed in the position contrary to setting up that commission of the three representatives of the PP (two) and Vox (one). The ultra formation has clearly said in the session that it was against that proposal. The popular have not formally denied this commission at the Table, but they have taken the opportunity to distance themselves from it by presenting an alternative in hand, without having registered it before, to request its expansion to all kinds of abuses and in all kinds of institutions .
The formation of the commission, its format and its future work schedule will now depend on whether the Board of Spokespersons votes to include it in an upcoming meeting on February 15. The parties that had processed the proposal have already advanced to the PSOE that should not stop or delay its debate in order to compensate the hundreds of victims as soon as possible.
The spokesman for the PSOE, Héctor Gómez, aware of this internal pressure within the government coalition and with his usual partners in Parliament, advanced this Tuesday, after the meeting, which there will be a commission, but he once again tempered the urgencies a lot of their natural allies in Congress. The PSOE will establish a position on what type of commission should be formed, whether research or experts, in the coming days, probably this week, and of course before the next meeting scheduled for the Board of Spokespersons, which will now experience a slight parenthesis for the electoral campaign in Castilla y León and will not meet again until Tuesday, February 15. It will be then when the sign of that commission becomes official. Gómez, meanwhile, wanted to emphasize that his party intends to form a commission with the utmost “rigor and seriousness” and with a great sense of “responsibility” in the face of such a sensitive matter.
The Socialists fear that a formal investigation commission, in which those appearing are obliged to attend but which can be broadcast publicly, could become a negative spectacle, especially for the victims of these abuses. The spokesman for the parliamentary group, in any case, announced that they will not be in favor of promoting two commissions at the same time, that is, one of investigation and another of experts, and he hopes that all the interests expressed in this regard can be squared in a single one, in contrary to what some spokespersons for United We Can point out, who did observe them even as complementary. Gómez also added that there are other relevant investigative works underway, such as the one that the State Attorney General has just commissioned from the territorial prosecutor’s offices.
The PP maintains that it did not demonstrate in the Table against the commission, although it did not support it, and accused the majority of the PSOE and United We Can of acting with “roll”. The popular asked at the meeting that this investigation of sexual abuse not only be about what has happened in the Church, but that it be extended to all areas. And there they included investigating child abuse regardless of who could be the cause or related to what happened in centers for minors in Valencia or the Balearic Islands in order to attack and question the work there of the governments in which Mónica Oltra participates (Compromís) and Francina Armengol (PSOE). In the Board of Spokespersons after the Table, the PP requested that the formation of commissions be voted on those cases in the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Community, and that proposal was rejected.
The Spanish Catholic Church is facing a major scandal after EL PAÍS delivered last December to Pope Francis and the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE) a report with 251 unpublished cases of sexual abuse committed by priests, religious and lay workers in the religious field , from the 1940s to the present. The journalistic investigation began in October 2018.
The State Attorney General’s Office ordered on Monday the 17 superior prosecutors in all of Spain to send it within 10 days all the complaints and complaints in process referring to assaults and sexual abuse of minors in any religious institution. With this compilation, the Prosecutor’s Office intends to make an X-ray of pederasty in the Spanish Church. However, prosecutors will not be able to collect all these files, since most of them are instructed in ecclesiastical processes and do not reach civil justice. In these cases, it has been the bishops and the superiors of the religious orders who have been in charge of investigating and judging them.
The victim of abuse Miguel Ángel Hurtado, who has managed to gather 52,760 signatures so far so that the investigation is not ascribed to the framework of the Congress of Deputies, but rather is independent of political power, declared this Tuesday before Congress: “We have presented publicly a proposal that can be complementary to the parliamentary investigation, thanks to which very important issues will be debated (such as registration deadlines, civil compensation, fight against cover-up), but which cannot quantify the magnitude of the problem. In other words, it cannot document the number of defendants, the number of victims, the number of possible accessories, where and when the events occurred…”, he reports. Lucia Foraster Garriga.
In this sense, Hurtado proposes to form a Truth Commission, similar to the one created in 2012 in Australia: “Independent experts dedicated exclusively to the active search for victims to take their testimony; open channels of communication; safe spaces that listen, repair and, above all, document”. After collecting all this information, Hurtado proposes that the Truth Commission draft a report “with concrete and specific recommendations” and deliver it to the Congress of Deputies.
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