No judge has ever opened an internal displacement inquiry or ordered a police investigation.
The playwright and Italian Nobel Prize in Literature, Luigi Pirandello, had six characters in search of an author. We, in Spain, have expelled sixty thousand people, by ETA, looking for a judge. Sixty thousand to two hundred thousand, actually, according to data collected by the Basque Institute of Criminology’s “Return Report.” Internally displaced persons, they are called with full normality by international law, people who, says UNHCR, have not crossed their country’s borders to seek safety, unlike refugees. His flight is within his own country.
Thousands of people, entire families, who had to flee for their lives from the Basque Country and Navarre for decades. As ETA leaders sat on each of their successive leaders, they launched numerous statements about how they would “exterminate them one by one or in groups,” if they didn’t leave forever. The same members of ‘Zuba’ (the executive committee of ETA) who have enjoyed total impunity for decades and without any of them having had to answer to criminal charges.
Today, February 11, marks the 25th anniversary of the historic declaration of the UN Commission on Human Rights recognizing the legal status of such internally displaced persons, that is, “persons or groups of persons who have been forced or compelled to escape or to flee”. from their home or place of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or to avoid the consequences of situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights (…) and who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border ».
And today, as yesterday or tomorrow, our state still fails to fulfill all the international human rights obligations recognized therein and in the successive international instruments adopted to create a legal framework for the protection of all these people. Like they didn’t exist. That the Commission on Human Rights proclaimed 25 years ago today that “every human being has the right to protection against arbitrary displacement which takes him away from his home or habitual residence”, and that it guarantees this and gives full protection to their rights it is a “primary obligation” it in no way applies to the south of the Pyrenees, that mountain system all too often not only geographically.
There has been no justice in Spain for such victims of “serious human rights violations”. It matters not that the Human Rights Commissioner of the Council of Europe also denounced this situation during his mission to the Basque Country in 2001, or that Ararteko himself acknowledged the existence of such outcasts in 2009 or that the Ombudsman of Spain . No Spanish judge has ever launched an investigation or ordered a police investigation in this regard. Neither the Public Prosecution Service has promoted anything ex officio.
After all, no other criminal behavior reaches such a large number of affected taxpayers (victims). Sixty thousand to two hundred thousand affected: the greatest crime ever committed within our borders since the Constitution. Who spoke of effective legal protection in Spain for all these persecuted?
Nor has there been any truth, when precisely in the country of the European Union with the highest number of internally displaced persons, Spain, they are not even normally recognized even by name as internally displaced persons, forcibly displaced that they are. Only one parliament in the country, that of Navarre, took the groundbreaking step forward in March 2015 by recognizing as normal all those Navarreans who were falsely “absent” from their streets and cities and officially proclaiming this day as February 11. And he did it at the request of this lawyer who registers to act for the Dignity and Justice association. An act of dignity and recognition that can still be expected from the Basque Parliament. Or from the Congress of Deputies itself.
There has not been, let alone, been repaired. Neither with regard to the numerous measures that the Human Rights Commission gathered on that other February 11, 1998 that we remember today, nor with regard to any of those measures that this highest body in the world continued to develop later on. Such as the ‘Principles on the restitution of homes and asset of flights and displaced persons’ of June 28, 2005. Much less would we enact a national law that would include all of this, as the Dignity and Justice Congress also insisted. None of the concept of ‘the right to a dignified and safe voluntary return’, a central idea in all of international law, or of facilities for the children of the expelled to study in the Basque Country or Navarre if they wish. No national information office for internally displaced persons by ETA. No specific mechanism to give them free legal aid and much more. Nothing. Nothing is nothing.
So no. This does not stop with the indisputable right to vote in the regions of the Basque Country and Navarre, and in their respective cities of origin, depending on whether they, the victims or the displaced, can choose freely. In fact, this all just starts with itself.
It is inconceivable that none of this would so helplessly and radically turn its back on all relevant international law if those affected were tens of thousands of French or Germans fleeing within their own countries.
Simply the world upside down.
This is all true, although perhaps the problem is that we are not so much Pirandello in Spain. Perhaps it is that we are here more of Ramón del Valle-Inclán and of those ominous concave mirrors of the Callejón del Gato in which, sometimes for too long, our national law seems to polish itself. Twenty-five years seems too long. “Bent forward skull!”.
Source: La Verdad
I am George Kunkel, an author working for Today Times Live. I specialize in opinion pieces and cover stories that are both informative and thought-provoking – helping to shape public discourse on key issues. My work is regularly featured across the network’s many platforms, including print media and social media.
