The Prosecutor’s Office will hear for the first time a victim of the torture of the Francoist police in Barcelona

The Prosecutor’s Office will hear for the first time a victim of the torture of the Francoist police in Barcelona. The Public Ministry has summoned the historic activist of the Catalan Independence Blanca Serra, which denounced four illegal arrests in 1977 and vexations and police officers for May 19.

The case of Serra supposes the first criminal proceedings open by the Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the torture perpetrated during the Francoism by police of the political-social brigade in dependencies of the Higher Head of Police of Via Laietana (Barcelona), the known as ‘Horro de los Horroros’.

The building is still immersed, in the middle of 2025, in a deep debate about their future: the victims of Francoism demand that the police move to another headquarters and the Headquarters become a memorial, as happened with the headquarters of the Stasi in Berlin. However, both Central and Catalan executives, both socialists, have cooled the transfer and maintain that the building can be at the same time police headquarters and memory place.

The opening of its own investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office came after the rejection of the judges to undertake the criminal means. The Barcelona Court concluded that the recent Democratic Memory Law, unlike what the victims interpreted, did not allow to investigate Franco’s crimes. What the Public Ministry could do, the judges reasoned, was to conduct their own investigations “to fill the right to the truth recognized in so many international treaties.”

And this is the route that the Prosecutor’s Office has undertaken after the complaint of Blanca Serra, historical activist of the Catalan independence left. The investigations are piloted by the Prosecutor’s Office of Barcelona, ​​in coordination with the Unit of Human Rights and Democratic Memory of the State Attorney General.

In case of finding the torture police, however, the Prosecutor’s Office may not prosecute them by criminal proceedings since justice has already made it clear that the amnesty law of 1977 and the prescription of crimes remain obstacles, despite the law of memory, to open causes in the courts.

The judges added that the reparation to the victims of Franco was necessary, but that it did not happen “mandatory” for the dictation of a criminal conviction. Serra can at least obtain an institutional reparation and know details of the facts after years of disinterest in investigating Francoist torture.

In the decree that opens the investigations, the Prosecutor’s Office explains that the investigation “is based on the obligation established by the Democratic Memory Law of conducting effective investigation that satisfies the right of victims to truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non -repetition, principles that are pillars of International Human Rights Law”.

Serra, who was born in 1943, filed his complaint last November. “I have thought about it a lot because many years have passed. And I hadn’t talked much about arrests and torture,” he explained. The main reason that pushed her to denounce faith “that youth is up to date on what happens, will happen and” and “claim justice.”