Not everything hateful is a hate crime. This has been recalled by the Superior Prosecutor’s Office of Catalonia when it filed the complaint that the Ibn Battuta Foundation filed against the mayor of Ripoll (Girona), Sílvia Orriols, of the far-right party Aliança Catalana, who was accused of hate crimes for put obstacles to the registration of migrants in the population and for their tweets against this group.
The entity presented its complaint after several cases became public of Muslim families who claimed that the Ripoll City Council placed obstacles in their way to register in the municipality, which prevented them from accessing social, educational and health services. In addition, the foundation added several tweets by Orriols against the registration of migrants and against Islam.
The foundation denounced the “odyssey” into which the council had converted a mere administrative management such as registration, giving rise to unjustified delays or sending the Local Police to carry out verifications. in situ.
In its archiving decree, the Prosecutor’s Office discards both legs of the entity’s complaint. Regarding the reported obstacles, prosecutor José Joaquín Pérez de Gregorio warns that the entity has not provided “any evidence” of the reported delays or resolutions that show that the Orriols council systematically denies or leaves in a drawer the requests to register.
The prosecutor also rules out that several messages on X (the old Twitter) by Orriols in which he advocated restricting the registration of migrants are a hate crime, as the entity maintained.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, Orriols limited himself to expressing in these messages a “personal opinion that is singularly critical of certain Islamist behaviors and conduct,” as well as what “in his personal opinion is an alleged abuse by members and the Maghreb immigrant group. the time to register irregularly.”
Orriols’ messages, the prosecutor explains, “may be objectionable, criticizable, rejectable, socially reprehensible” and even punishable by administrative means, but they do not exceed the limit of the Penal Code since, in his opinion, “they do not promote exhaustively and “There is no doubt the hatred against the Maghreb collective.”
Once the file has been filed with the Prosecutor’s Office, the entity can reiterate its complaint before the Civil and Criminal Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC), a court before which Orriols is admitted due to her status as a parliamentarian.
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