The Public Prosecutor’s Office appeals against the minimum sentence for the ultra Pedro Varela and calls for the definitive closure of his neo-Nazi bookshop
Oriol Solé Altimira
7-9 minutes
The Barcelona public prosecutor’s office against hate crimes has appealed against the sentence that condemned the neo-Nazi Pedro Varela to a minimum sentence. As elDiario.es has learned, the prosecutor is asking the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) to increase to eight years in prison the 18-month sentence imposed on the ultra in the first instance and, in particular, to order the definitive closure of the bookshop and publishing house owned by the neo-Nazi, which the Barcelona Court of Appeal rejected.
The sentence of the Barcelona High Court left an extensive investigation by the Mossos d’Esquadra and the Public Prosecutor’s Office in tatters by acquitting all the accused except Varela and sentencing the well-known neo-Nazi (who hours before the trial attended a Vox rally) to a sentence of only one and a half years in prison, compared to the 12 years demanded by the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
Born in Barcelona in 1957, in his youth Varela was one of the disciples of Leon Degrelle, a Belgian SS officer whom Franco gave asylum in Spain. In 1978, Varela became president of CEDADE, the largest organisation producing Nazi propaganda and a breeding ground for a large part of the Spanish extreme right until its dissolution in 1993. He has three convictions for spreading neo-Nazi ideology.
The case was the fourth trial against Pedro Varela and the legal tool to close down once and for all the Europa bookshop and the Ojeda publishing house, owned by this veteran of the neo-Nazi movement and converted into two of the epicentres of ultra propaganda in Barcelona: books such as ‘Mein Kampf’ were sold there and international supremacist or Ku Klux Klan leaders came to give lectures.
The Barcelona Court, however, rejected the definitive closure of Varela’s business, as well as the prohibition to publish books again, and decreed only the destruction of the copies of neo-Nazi books that had been seized in 2016, when the investigating judge in the case decreed the precautionary closure of the establishment.
The refusal to close the bookshop and the neo-Nazi publishing house for good was based on the fact that the court did not convict Varela of illicit association. The judges only punished the neo-Nazi with 18 months in prison for the crime of incitement to hatred for the publishing, sale and distribution of Nazi books by Varela, whom the court went so far as to highlight as having ‘rescued works openly and grossly discriminatory towards Jews’.
The books and the talks and activities of the Europa bookshop were aimed at ‘the defence and praise of several of its authors, such as Adolf Hiter and Rudolf Hess’, the ruling added. However, the closure of the shops could only be a consequence of a conviction for unlawful association and not for incitement to hatred, the court reasoned.
In a pedagogical argument, prosecutor Marta Gloria López Catalá compared the case of Varela’s establishments and businesses to the seizure of drug trafficking boats. If the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court has endorsed the definitive seizure of vehicles used to transport narcotics, it should also proceed in the same way with the vehicles (in this case, the bookshop and the publishing house) through which Varela propagated the hate speech for which he has been convicted, the prosecutor reasons.
‘The spaces of the Europa bookshop and Ediciones Ojeda and its trademark registered in the register of patents are the instruments through which the criminal acts were committed’, recalls the prosecutor, who does see it as possible that their closure is a consequence of the conviction for incitement to hatred. For this reason, the appeal does not include a request for a conviction for unlawful association, but sees the closure as legally fitting in the only offence for which he was convicted in the first instance.
In addition to the closure of the premises, the Prosecutor’s Office requests in its appeal the closure of the websites of the bookshop and the publishing house, as well as its Facebook page and the money confiscated from Varela’s bank account, which the Barcelona Court of Appeal also saved from being definitively destroyed.
