The Attorney General Proposes To Punish Hate Crimes With Jobs

The State Attorney General, Dolores Delgado, advocated this Tuesday before the Senate Justice Commission for a reform of hate crimes , included in article 510 of the Penal Code, to introduce greater proportionality of the penalties to be imposed , lower than those provided for in prison or fines or related to the loss of political rights and jobs for the community provided they are known and accepted by their victims so that they know the damage they cause.

Delgado, who appeared before the senators to give an account of the 2018 and 2019 reports of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, explained that the proposal came from the hate service of the Barcelona Prosecutor’s Office and understood it convenient to specify that “freedom of expression has nothing to do with violence “, whose episodes” will be pursued. ”

She pointed out that she was an anti-terrorist prosecutor and that jihadism has a very important part of “indoctrination and expression in social networks”, for which many young people went to Syria.

To then explicitly separate this phenomenon from hate crimes, in which he pointed to the need to “apply restorative justice, with jobs for the community because with them the community is damaged and that debt must be paid.” And in that sense, he called on the senators to work, because prosecutors will apply the law that exists and will prosecute all episodes of violence that occur.

It had previously justified the need to provide proportionality of the 510 sentences based on the context, content or circumstances of the perpetrator for the crimes committed on the occasion of the exercise of fundamental rights and public freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, which are so Today has put the imprisonment of rapper Pablo Hasél , although he was for insults to the crown and glorification of terrorism.

A “deep and serene reflection”
The attorney general, who has asked the senators for a “deep and serene reflection” on these crimes, explained that “the severe punitive regime” of Article 510 that reaches four years in prison aims to protect against the public dissemination of certain messages that directly or indirectly incite hatred, but in the absence of repetition or taking into account the personal characteristics of the author, they can be considered of a lesser entity and “less rigor” would make it more effective.

In this regard, it referred to the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance of 2015, as well as to the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the Constitutional Court.

The proposal was rejected during the commission itself by the PP senator Fernando de Rosa, who reproached him for the proposal to modify the hate crime, although he assimilated it to the promotion of terrorism, and asked him directly if a specific passage of a crime is a crime. Hasél’s song in which he talks about shots to the neck.

The harshness that he used against the attorney general with continuous reference to his partner, former judge Baltasar Garzón, and former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, was the reason for a response by the PSOE senator Txema Oleaga who reminded him that he had been a senior official in the Government of Francisco Camps in Valencia and later was vice president of the CGPJ.

The attorney general declined any response in this regard beyond assuring that “Spain should not have problems with its prosecution, because it has all the checks to not deviate” from its function.