The high court has admitted an appeal for violation of fundamental rights to be processed
FERNANDO J. PÉREZ
Madrid 10 ENE 2017
The Constitutional Court admitted a new appeal against the legal reform approved by the PP in March 2014 that limited the so-called universal justice, that is to say, the ability of Spanish judges to investigate and prosecute crimes committed outside the national territory. The high court will review the validity of the closing of the call Tibet case, in which several leaders of the People's Republic of China, among them former president Jiang Zemin and former Prime Minister Li Peg, were charged with genocide.
This cause, that was investigated in the National Court, was definitively archived in April 2015 in application of the reform of the Organic Law of the Judiciary, that reduced universal justice to the minimum expression.
This is the second time that the body still directed by Francisco Pérez de los Cobos admits to processing an appeal that questions the constitutionality of the extreme limitation of universal jurisdiction.. In July 2014, a few months after the reform came into force, The PSOE presented another appeal that was accepted by the high court, and that is pending resolution. Both the admission of 2014 like the one that has just been known in the Tibet case They do not imply the paralysis of the norm, harshly criticized by both the main judicial associations and the Prosecutor's Office of the National Court.
Great significance
The Fourth Section of the Constitution appreciates that in the case of the limitation of universal justice there is “a special constitutional significance”, when the alleged violation of fundamental rights arises —in this case that of effective judicial protection— of the law itself.
The actions against the Chinese leadership were initiated by the Tibet Support Committee, based in Barcelona. The lawyer of this organization, José Elías Esteve, stated in a press release that the admission of the appeal for protection “opens again the door to hope not only for the Tibetan victims, but to that of other serious conflicts that had been abandoned.".
After the shelving of universal justice, cases such as the death of the Spanish journalist José Couso in Iraq in 2003 and torture in Guantánamo.
