Spain passes law to bring "justice" to Franco-era victims

WORLD  06 October 2022 - 23:30

Five decades after the death of General Franco, and three years after the Spanish dictator's remains were finally removed from his hulking mausoleum outside Madrid, the country's senate has approved legislation intended to bring "justice, reparation and dignity" to the victims of the civil war and subsequent dictatorship.

On October 5, the upper house of Spain's parliament passed the socialist-led government's Democratic Memory law, with 128 votes in favour, 113 against, and 18 abstentions, The Guardian reports.

The legislation, which was approved by Spain's congress in July, contains dozens of measures intended to help "settle Spanish democracy's debt to its past".

Among them are the creation of a census and a national DNA bank to help locate and identify the remains of the tens of thousands of people who still lie in unmarked graves, a ban on groups that glorify the Franco regime, and a "redefinition" of the Valley of the Fallen, the giant basilica and memorial where Franco lay for 44 years until his exhumation in 2019.

According to the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the legislation will help "encourage a shared discussion based on the defence of peace, on pluralism and on broadening human rights and constitutional freedoms".

In a tweet after the vote, Sánchez said: "We socialists have always worked to strengthen our democracy and today we have taken another step towards justice, reparation and dignity for all the victims."

The new law builds on 2007 historical memory legislation introduced under another socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, which was resisted by Spain's conservative People's Party (PP). Many on the Spanish right have opposed legislative efforts to revisit the past, saying they risk undermining the 1977 amnesty law and the so-called Pact of Forgetting that helped to usher Spain back to democracy after Franco's death.

Caliber.Az