The case of the infiltrated police officers has reached the Constitutional Court. The first activists have gone to the guarantee body after refusing ordinary courts to investigate the police espionage to which they were subjected. In their appeal, the women demand that the officers put “legal and ethical limits on police practices,” since the activity of the undercover police officers is not subject to judicial control, unlike undercover agents.
The appeal comes after the Barcelona Court confirmed the filing of his complaint without even investigating it. A flat closure that clashes with the reproaches that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has made in the past to the Spanish Justice for not investigating complaints of degrading treatment or torture. “There is a lack of effective investigation of some very serious events,” lamented the complainants’ lawyer, Mireia Salazar, from the Irídia center.
Both the investigating judge, the Barcelona Court and the Prosecutor’s Office ruled out that the police’s infiltration into the social and anarchist movements of Barcelona represented a crime of torture or against moral integrity. The judges also did not want to investigate whether the fact that he omitted his status as a police officer to have sexual relations with the five activists could constitute a crime of sexual abuse.
The activists’ appeal alleges that police infiltration without judicial control, as has occurred in the cases of the anarchists of Barcelona, the independentists of Girona or the social movements of Madrid and Valencia, clearly violates the right to privacy, which would have forced the judges to investigate thoroughly. But it didn’t happen.
In the case of the Barcelona activists, the fact of sexual relations is added, which, in their opinion, allowed the infiltrated agent “to access intimate personal information and collective political information, with the consequent instrumentalization and objectification and the affectation of their bodily sovereignty, their sexual freedom, their intimacy and their moral integrity.”
Hiding his identity as a police officer to have sexual relations “placed the women in a disadvantageous situation that the agent took advantage of,” the appeal indicates. According to the women’s defense, the agent had “coverage” from the Ministry of the Interior, without which “he would not have been able to display a fictitious identity with a degree of perfection sufficient to deceive these women.”
The refusal of the courts to investigate their complaint, adds the defense, represents a violation of the right to effective judicial protection of the activists, which is added to their rights to physical and moral integrity, the prohibition of torture and degrading treatment. , privacy and freedom of assembly and association.
#spied #activists #Constitutional #Court #put #legal #ethical #limits #infiltrated #police
