25,000 formal complaints against the Spanish
ara - 20.01.2004 20:04
A minimum of a thousand formal complaints for each of the 25 years that have passed since the so called “transition to democracy”. This is the objective the left-wing nationalists hope to achieve as part of an effort to “convert the Spanish elections into Basque elections” and make it clear that Euskal Herrria suffers “the violation of their human, civil and political rights” at the hands of the Spanish State.
To do this, a time frame of about a month and a half has been set until the beginning of the electoral campaign. The official complaints made will be sent to the United Nations Organisation (UNO), specifically to the Secretary for Human Rights.
The Spanish State is due to appear before this international body in May of this year, due to the complaints they have received about “the violation of different rights, among those torture”, Joseba Permach, member of the national executive of Batasuna, pointed out.
The single point made in the text of the complaint states that “the Spanish State, together with the French State, denies the existence of Euskal Herria. This denial has generated a permanent conflict and centuries of suffering” for Basque citizens.
It then specifies that “A constitution that denies our rights was imposed on us, they deny us the right to self-determination, they persecute the freedom of speech, they criminalise the desire to live using our own language, they persecute the use of our own national symbols, they deny us the right to manage our natural or economic resources or indeed our own political system”.
Additionally, those who sign the document will testify to the United Nations that in the Spanish State “legal, political and security measures are taken against all attempts to organise ourselves and structure ourselves as a nation, in an attempt to prevent us from appearing before the world as a nation”.
“Some evidence of that” are the cases like “the nuclear power station in Lemoiz, NATO entry, GAL activities, the deaths of Joxi Zabala and Joxean Lasa, the closure of “Egin”, “Egin Irratia” and “Egunkaria”, the banning of political parties and organisations, the attacks on the ikurriña (Basque flag), the use of torture, the political apartheid endured by the pro-independence movement, the policy of prisoner dispersal of political prisoners”
Permach, who introduced himself as “a member of the banned Batasuna party and someone being charged by judge Garzón”, underlined that those who had shared a table with him the previous day as merely “an example of the thousands of Basques that have similar motives to ours for making a formal complaint”
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