The President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced this Thursday that “sedition” will be eliminated from the criminal code and replaced by another less punishable crime, in order to “relax the situation in Catalonia”, where several separatist leaders have been sentenced for this crime.
Sedition, which consists of trying to prevent by force the application of laws or the exercise of legitimate authority, is currently punishable in Spain with eight years in prison, or even 15 years when the perpetrator is a public official.
A dozen Catalan separatist politicians have been heavily convicted of sedition after Catalonia’s 2017 secession attempt, the worst political crisis in Spain’s recent history. They were later pardoned.
“It is a crime that has been with us for 200 years”
In an interview with the television channel La Sexta, Pedro Sánchez announced that his Socialist Party and its radical left ally United We Can present a bill to Parliament on Friday to replace the crime of sedition with another less punishable crime.
“We are going to present a legislative initiative to reform the crime of sedition and replace it with a crime more or less comparable to that of other European democracies: Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland,” said Pedro Sánchez.
The new crime will be called “aggravated public disorder” and will have penalties similar to those “provided for in the criminal codes of European democracies,” he added.
“We are reviewing a crime that was established in 1822 in Spain. It is a crime that comes from 200 years ago, when there were military uprisings in Spain. Fortunately, Spain has changed for the better”, he continues justifying.
The head of government clarified that former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and two other separatist leaders on the run abroad since 2017 were still on trial in Spain.
“The crimes committed in 2017 will continue to be present in our criminal code, although they will no longer be crimes of sedition, but rather as another crime called aggravated public disorder,” said Pedro Sánchez.
Source: BFM TV
