The Prosecutor's Office of the National Court is studying whether to investigate the 44 people convicted of belonging to ETA who have been included in the electoral lists of EH Bildu after receiving the complaint filed by the Dignity and Justice Association in which its president, Daniel Portero, urged to check if the candidacies are valid.

Through a press release, the Public Ministry has informed that after receiving the aforementioned document “it has proceeded to its registration, and after its analysis, the appropriate decision will be made, regarding the opening or not of pre-trial investigation proceedings” .

In his letter, DyJ warns that “subjects who have been convicted of terrorist crimes are running in the municipal and regional elections in the Basque Country, and seven of them for terrorist murder and who are running as candidates in the municipalities in which they committed the murders and their victims live, with the consequent humiliation and vilification that it causes to the victims of terrorism”.

Otegi case, the precedent

In this sense, the association maintains that “it is the duty and obligation of the Rule of Law to be especially cautious and scrupulous in complying with the legally demanded requirements to be able to run as candidates for elections”, checking whether all of them have served their respective sentences.

Thus, it points out that “there are already precedents in which this association has denounced essentially identical facts in which it has been possible to prove that subjects convicted of terrorist crimes have attended elections despite not having served the sentence of special disqualification for employment or public office, as is the case of Iker Casanova Alonso”.

“Another precedent is the case of Arnaldo Otegi,” adds the complaint, which recalls that the Electoral Board of Guipúzcoa agreed in August 2016 to exclude the current leader of EH Bildu as a candidate, “thus avoiding concurrence in regional elections of a convicted of the crime of terrorism, with the sentence of disqualification not served”.