The new suspension of the entry into prison of the extremists who assaulted the Blanquerna bookstore in Madrid during the celebration of Catalan National Day in 2013, who have been tried and convicted, is a mockery and one more demonstration that justice is not equal for everyone. The fact that at this point none of the convicts have spent a single night in prison is a permanent mockery of all those who have suffered strict action - also exaggerated - for the simple fact of being pro-independence. That there is a double standard is obvious. But when this is taken to the extremes of the far-rightists who led that assault, and the structures of the Spanish state and the media of its establishment accept it as something natural without giving it any importance, we enter another phase that it has little or nothing to do with justice.
The new and surprising paralysis of the sentence is connected with the fact that it has been final since last July. It has been in the hands of the Provincial Audience of Madrid, pending the resolution of the appeals to the Constitutional Court and the pardon requests being considered in the Supreme Court. I don't know how long all this will take - neither the Supreme Court nor the Constitutional Court are the fastest in the world when they are not interested - but I do know, on the other hand, the time that Catalan pro-independence leaders have spent in prison with an sentence that is exaggeratedly unjust and the suspension of their open prison regime which is made every time the regime is granted by the treatment boards of the prisons of Lledoners, Puig de les Basses and Wad-Ras, and all this with the most absurd explanations possible.
Of the fourteen convicts, one was already subject to a search and capture warrant and another has apparently also taken the opportunity to flee. For the court, these are not motives sufficient to order the immediate imprisonment of the rest of the group. And it is very easy to recall cases in which just the opposite was alleged to prevent the defendants from fleeing; perhaps some of them ring a bell. Another of those who should have been imprisoned this Thursday tops the candidature list for the Falange in the elections for the Community of Madrid and yet a fourth member of the group is accompanying him on the electoral list. And in the face of all this, a deafening silence from the Spanish political class, intellectuals and the media.
It is not the only case of the drift that some matters are taking in Spain. Examples such as the riots in Vallecas due to the Vox party rally that resulted in almost forty people injured, or the far-right aggressions on October 9th in Valencia, are beginning to be less and less exceptional. Many times, in the face of police passivity or indifference and the surprising position of the justice system. It is not obligatory to wait for the problem to become insoluble before moving to redirect it. Nor is it good to permanently look the other way since, when all is said and done, what is deteriorating are the democratic parameters of a society that can do little or nothing if its political powers remain unresponsive.