The Criminal Chamber of supreme court (TS) has not admitted for processing the complaint for the crime of prevarication that he presented vox just four months ago against the first vice president of Congress, Alfonso Rodríguez Gómez de Celis. The socialist had called Patricia Rueda, deputy from the far-right party, to order for using the term “filoetarras” to refer to EH Bildu during a speech. In the first moment, Gomez de Celis He asked him to withdraw the disqualifying word and, given his refusal, deprived him of the use of the floor.
The magistrates of the judicial body, in accordance with the criteria of the prosecutionhave rejected the request for vox when considering that, whether “correct or not” the action of the vice president of the Lower House “in no way can arbitrariness be predicated“. In the same way, the TS ensures that “it does not integrate any criminal conduct.”
The events in question took place on November 29, 2022, when Rueda intervened in the session to question a parliamentary initiative of the PSOE that supported Malaga’s candidacy for Expo 2027. Gomez de Celis He held at that time and provisionally the presidency of the Chamber. The representative of vox He criticized the fact that the coalition government ignored Malaga and the “loyal” regions, while rewarding “filoetarras, nationalists and coup leaders“.
After this comment, the socialist leader asked her to rectify but the far-right deputy refused, a decision that had two immediate consequences: the word was withdrawn and was forced to leave the rostrum. Vox’s legal team took the case to the Supreme Court and denounced “the utter lack of justificationof respect for constitutional principles and parliamentary freedom of expression” of the Vice President of the Congress.
The magistrates maintain that, although it is concluded “in a difficult hypothesis” that the qualifier “filoetarra“would be “decent” for the Lower House and its members, “because of its semantic content, propitiates to understand it as insulting and vexatious“. The fact that other times it had gone unnoticed does not deprive the expression of its meaning, “commonly understood as offensive”.
He Supreme also recalls that, within the framework of a debate that had nothing to do with what vox exposed, but with Malaga’s candidacy to host Expo 2027, “it was not illustrative to introduce such affiliations to expose the position of the parliamentary group”. With this ruling, the judicial body supports the role of the Presidency of Congress in its power to call to order when utterances are made. offensive words or concepts for the chamber or the public representatives sitting there.
