During last year and especially during the last two months Spanish medias have been talking about the doctrina Parot (the Parot doctrine).
What is the Parot doctrine?
The Term Parot doctrine is making reference to Henri Parot, a notorious member of the ETA terrorist group. Despite using a firearm to resist arrest he was taken into custody on April 2, 1990. Later that year he was convicted of 26 murders between 1978 and 1990, he was also found guilty of involvement in the 1987 Zaragoza Barracks bombing which killed 11 people (including 5 children and 2 women). He was given a cumulative sentence of 4,797 years in prison.
The Spanish criminal code of 1973 considers a maximum prison life sentence of 30 years that can be reduced by a maximum of 12 years for good conduct during imprisonment, including study and work. On February 28 2006, the Spanish Supreme Court sentenced that the prison benefits provided by law are applicable to each sentence individually and not to the maximum 30-year term. This is the core of the doctrina Parot (which interpretation was slightly modified in 2008).
In practice this doctrine prevents most ETA terrorists presently in jail to get out of prison in 15 or 20 years and force them to serve the full 30 years sentence in prison.
In 2009 another ETA terrorist Inés del Río, appealed to the Strasbourg European Court of bomb attacks and sentenced to more than 3000 years of prison was supposed to be released in 2008. But with the Parot Doctrine applied she will not be released until 2017.
The Spanish government versus The Strasbourg Court.
In July 2012, the Strasbourg court ruled in favour of Inés del Río claiming that the Parot Doctrine was infringing the European Convention on Human Rights and ordering the immediate release with an indenisation of 30,000€. In particular, article 7 of the convention prevents the retroactivity of a criminal law. Even though the ruling was related to Inés del Río specifically, 30 other imprisoned ETA terrorists appealed to Strasbourg during the following months.
Spain appealed this ruling claiming that the Parrot Doctrine was not a law change, but a jurisprudential interpretation of the laws, which is a entitlement of the individual EU member states.
Many political interests have clouded the discussion about the legality of the Parot Doctrine. On the one hand the government and the victims associations were claiming that the Parot doctrine was an answer to a weakness of the Spanish sentence system (why the crime of one murder and the crime of 132 murders should be punished the same way?). On the other hand the Basque government, IU and other organizations were claiming that a Supreme Court couldn’t change retroactively the application of the criminal law.
On Monday 21 October 2013, the appeal from the Spanish government was rejected.
The implications of the rejection.-
The implications of this ruling are far reaching. More than 130 ETA and 7 GRAPO (a Spanish Maoist terrorist group) terrorists might be freed. Also 14 highly dangerous common criminals might get freed as well before the 30 years maximum sentence, like Pablo Manuel Garcia Ribaldo, condemned to 1721 years for raping 51 women.