The PSOE government of Pedro Sánchez has moved 66 ETA prisoners back to the Basque Country since he took office.
The Spanish Interior Ministry has resumed its programme of transfers between jails and seven ETA prisoners will complete their sentences nearer to their families, six of them in Basque Country prisons.
During the years between 1961 and 2011 Basque separatist group ETA ( Euskadi Ta Askatasuna ) carried out more than 3,300 terror attacks, the death toll of their victims believed to number 829 people and over 2,000 injured, although some victims’ associations place the final count at 952.
Although ETA has now disbanded, there are still hundreds of prisoners convicted for terror offences relating to the activities of the group serving prison sentences and over the years there has been a significant campaign for them to be housed nearer to their families.
During the period in which the group was still active the Spanish government employed a policy of dispersing ETA prisoners as far away from the Basque Country as possible and separating individuals from other prisoners known to have been members of the group, the official reason given being that communication between ETA members was organised and highly active within the prison system, representing a threat to the safety of the public.
Unofficially, the dispersement also caused further hardship for convicted terrorists, their families and supporters, and was supported by members of organisations and political parties whose family members, colleagues and friends had been targeted or murdered during the terror campaign.
Over the years an intense campaign was undertaken to ease the conditions in which prisoners were kept and the way in which they were treated, part of which was to secure agreement that they could be transferred nearer to their families, which included several high-profile hunger strikes.
In 2018 the PSOE party instigated a vote of no confidence against the ruling PP party, ousting them from government, after receiving support from Basque nationalists and after this, the Socialist government began to ease the dispersion policy and started the process of transferring former ETA prisoners to prisons either in, or nearer to, the Basque Country.
This Tuesday (August 31) a further seven transfers were authorised, six to Basque prisons.
With these seven transfers, the number of prisoners who have been transferred since Pedro Sánchez took office and will finish serving their sentences in the Basque Country rises to 66 and as of July 1, there are no ETA prisoners serving sentences south of Madrid.
Groups representing the victims of terrorism, including the Association of Victims of Terrorism (AVT) remain opposed to the transfers and in a statement, the association states that, with these transfers, the Interior Minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, “fails the victims of terrorism,” whom he promised that he “would never betray.”
Image: Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez
Source: Murcia Today
