Thousands of women's rights advocates hit the streets of Spain's major cities Thursday to protest a verdict that cleared five men of rape, instead given lighter sentence. </s> Protests have swept through the cities of Spain as five men accused of gang rape of a teenager during the 2016 Pamplona bulls festival were found guilty of the lesser offense of sexual abuse.

People, holding placards, shouted slogans "This justice is bullsh*t," "It's not abuse, it's rape!" gathering outside the justice ministry in Madrid, the Plaça Sant Jaume in Barcelona and in a number of other cities.

​The verdict on the case was delivered at a court in Pamplona, the capital of the Navarre region in northern Spain. The five defendants were sentenced to nine years in prison and ordered to pay €10,000 each to the young woman, who was 18 years old at the time of the attack.

The judges characterized the attack as "continuous sexual abuse," but not rape. According to Spanish law, the lesser offense of sexual abuse does not involve violence or intimidation, which differs it from rape. </s> Protests have erupted across Spain after five men were jailed for nine years each for sexual abuse in what activists saw as a gang rape during the 2016 running of the bulls festival in Pamplona.

Protests have erupted across Spain after five men were jailed for nine years each for sexual abuse in what activists saw as a gang rape during the 2016 running of the bulls festival in Pamplona.

Protests held across Spain after five men cleared for Pamplona gang rape

Police stopped the crowd from advancing toward the entrance to the court, with some angry demonstrators shoving officers. Thousands of protesters gathered hours later in central Pamplona and most of Spain's major cities, including Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla, Bilbao, Valencia and Zaragoza.

Demonstrators shouted slogans like "No is no!" while some waved homemade signs and wore red gloves as a symbol of protest. The five members of La Manada - or The Pack, after the nickname the group gave themselves - were found guilty of sexual abuse, which does not involve violence or intimidation under Spain's criminal code.

The prosecution had argued that violence was used and the 18-year-old victim did not consent to intercourse. The court on Thursday chose the lesser sexual abuse charge in contrast to the more severe charge prosecutors sought along with harsher sentences of more than 22 years in prison.

The court agreed there was no consent because the defendants were in a position of "superiority that curtailed the victim's freedom". One of the three judges in the panel voted in favour of acquitting the defendants, the court said.

According to testimony at the trial, the men offered to accompany the victim to her car but instead hauled her into a building where they filmed their assault with their smartphones. They then took her mobile phone and left. The men argued that the young woman had consented to intercourse.

To support the claim, their lawyers produced detectives' reports on the victim's behaviour after the incident, causing outrage among women's rights groups who said the victim was being judged for her behaviour rather than the attackers. The defence then withdrew the report. In addition to the prison time, the court ruled they should jointly compensate the victim with €50,000 and refrain from contacting her for 15 years.

The five have been in pre-trial custody since they were arrested after the incident. The president of Spain's Feminist Party, Lidia Falcon, told La Sexta television that the ruling means rape in Spain is "practically free" of punishment. Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria said the government "had to respect" the controversial ruling, while adding that authorities must respond to the public uproar.

"I think we have to analyse what we as public authorities must do so that incidents like this don't happen again in our country," she said. Justice Minister Raphael Catala said that the laws in question date from 1995 and should be reviewed to see if "it is convenient to push for their revision". </s> Spain could change its criminal law after five men accused of gang raping a teenager at the Pamplona bull run were jailed for sexual abuse.

Thousands of people staged a second day of protests across the country, including in Barcelona and Madrid, after the five men were sentenced on Thursday to nine years in jail for the lesser offence.

Demonstrators gathered outside the Pamplona court which handed down the verdict, shouting "it's not sexual abuse, it's rape".

They also held banners reading "palace of injustice".

The Spanish government announced on Friday that it would consider reforming the law in response.

Activists described the attack on an 18-year-old woman during the 2016 running of the bulls festival as a gang rape.

The men, aged 27 to 29, were accused of attacking the woman at the entrance to an apartment building at the start of the week-long San Fermin festival, which draws tens of thousands of visitors.

Leaving her half naked, the group, which included a Guardia Civil policeman and a former solidier, then stole her mobile phone.

The five, all from Seville, also filmed the incident with their phones and then bragged about it on a WhatsApp group where they referred to themselves as "La Manada" - the pack.

Judges acquitted them of sexual assault, which includes rape, after ruling there was no "violence or intimidation" in the case.

The judges also ruled the victim had not consented, but neither had she expressed any opposition.

Several left-wing politicians questioned the verdict, and the regional government of Navarre province said it would launch an appeal because it "shares the discontent of the citizens".

The prosecutors office said it will also challenge the judgement, after prosecutors argued during the trial last autumn there was "serious intimidation and it prevented resistance or flight".

Lawyers had called for each of the men, several who are "ultras" who support FC Sevilla, to be jailed for 22 years and 10 months.

The group has been kept in pre-trial custody since they were arrested and were also ordered to pay the victim €50,000 (£43,923) in compensation.

Their lawyers argued the victim agreed to the sexual encounter and only admitted the gang had stolen her mobile phone.

Lawyers for four of the men said they would appeal, as did the woman's lawyer.

Further demonstrations are planned in Pamplona for Saturday, the Pamplona Woman's Movement said. </s> Protests are being held across Spain after five men accused of the gang rape of a teenager during the running of the bulls festival in Pamplona were found guilty of the lesser offence of sexual abuse.

The attack two years ago prompted a national outcry, as did the subsequent trial, which was widely criticised as a cross-examination of the 18-year-old woman rather than the men who attacked her.

The verdicts were delivered at a court in Pamplona, the capital of the Navarre region of northern Spain. José Ángel Prenda, Alfonso Cabezuelo, Antonio Manuel Guerrero, Jesús Escudero and Ángel Boza were sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment, five years’ probation and ordered to pay €10,000 each to the woman. Guerrero, a Guardia Civil police officer, was also fined €900 for stealing her phone after the attack.

Protesters in Pamplona shouted “This justice is bullshit!”, “It’s not abuse, it’s rape!” and “If they touch one of us, they touch all of us!” after the verdict was read out. On Thursday evening thousands more demonstrators gathered outside the justice ministry in Madrid, the Plaça Sant Jaume in Barcelona and in cities across the country.

The men were found guilty of the “continuous sexual abuse” of the woman in the lobby of a building in the early hours of 7 July 2016, but not of rape.



Under Spanish law, the lesser offence of sexual abuse differs from rape in that it does not involve violence or intimidation. One of the judges argued that the men should have been cleared of all charges except the phone theft.

The men, who called themselves la manada or “the wolf pack” in their WhatsApp group, had offered to walk the woman to her car but instead took her into the hall of a building, attacked her and filmed the assault on their phones.

The victim was later found crying on a bench. She described her attackers to police, who arrested the five men the following day.



Their defence lawyers claimed the woman had consented and had let one of the men kiss her. They also argued that 96 seconds of video footage from the men’s phones – showing the woman immobile and with her eyes shut during the attack – was proof of consent.

The prosecution, however, said the victim had been too terrified to move.

“The defendants want us to believe that on that night they met an 18-year-old girl, living a normal life, who, after 20 minutes of conversation with people she didn’t know, agreed to group sex involving every type of penetration, sometimes simultaneously, without using a condom,” the prosecutor Elena Sarasate said.

If the sex was consensual why had they taken her phone, Sarasate asked. “The obvious thing would be to exchange phone numbers, not steal her phone.”



The proceedings were also criticised after the judges accepted into evidence a report compiled by a private detective hired by some of the defendants. The detective had followed the woman over several days and produced photographs of her smiling with friends.



'It's really ugly': anger and anxiety over sexual violence at the Pamplona bull run Read more

This was presented as evidence that she had not suffered any lasting trauma, prompting hundreds of women to demonstrate outside court holding signs reading: “We believe you, sister.”

Thursday’s verdict came after five months of deliberation by judges. Prosecutors had sought jail terms of 22 years each.



The woman’s lawyer said she was disappointed with the sentence and would appeal against it. A spokeswoman for the Navarre regional government said it did not agree with the verdict and would also appeal.

A lawyer for four of the men said they planned to appeal against their sentences, saying the court “can’t just come up with the offence of sexual abuse when it never formed the basis of the accusation and wasn’t something the defence could prepare for”.

The verdicts were quickly and fiercely criticised by many senior politicians and human rights groups.

Susana Díaz, the president of the regional government of Andalusia, tweeted: “I always respect judicial sentences but this is one I neither understand nor agree with. We must have zero tolerance for sexual violence throughout society.”

Her colleague, Pedro Sánchez, the leader of Spain’s socialist party, wrote: “She said NO. We believe you and we’ll keep believing you. If what the ‘wolfpack’ did wasn’t group violence against a defenceless woman, then what do we understand by rape?”

As demonstrations were announced across Spain, Amnesty International said: “The lack of legal recognition that sexual relations without consent constitute rape gives rise to the idea that it’s down to us as women to protect ourselves from rape.

Meanwhile the international human rights group Women’s Link said the case had offered judges a “unique opportunity” to set a precedent that would help protect victims of sexual assaults. But “the court didn’t take it. Once again. Once again, what a disappointment.”

Spain’s deputy prime minister, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, said while the judge’s sentences ought to be respected, the authorities now needed to analyse what had happened “to avoid such behaviour happening again in this country”.

In a tweet posted shortly after the verdicts were read out, Spain’s national police force wrote “No means no” 12 times, along with their emergency phone number and the message: “We’re with you.” </s> MADRID (AP) — The trial of seven men and one woman accused of beating up two police officers and their girlfriends two years ago in northern Spain opened Monday amid controversy because of the terrorism charges brought against the defendants.

The fight at a bar in the small town of Alsasua in the early hours of Oct. 15, 2016, left one off-duty officer with a broken ankle and caused psychological trauma to all the victims, according to Civil Guard unions.

Prosecutors say the brawl should be punished under the country's terrorism laws, as crimes of terrorist intent. They claim the attackers were members of Basque activism groups and that targeted the off-duty officers as part of their campaign to oust Spanish security forces from Basque areas. The goal is also shared by the militant separatist group ETA.

Areas with a strong Basque identity are grappling to overcome decades of violence at the hands of ETA, which killed more than 800 people including police, politicians and entrepreneurs before giving up its armed campaign for Basque independence in 2011.

Supporters say the charges are disproportionate for what they consider that was a simple bar brawl. They also complain that three of the defendants have been kept in pre-trial custody for nearly 18 months. They also consider the prosecutors' request for prison sentences ranging between 12 and 62 years as unreasonable.

"It would be a real judicial aberration to uphold the charges," defense lawyer Manuel Olle said Monday. "That would be trivializing terrorism in the criminal code."

Hearings have been scheduled for the next two weeks in the highly anticipated trial that opened Monday at the National Court in Madrid. A verdict could be months away.

Backed by regional and local authorities, tens of thousands of people protested over the weekend in the northern city of Pamplona, the capital of the province where Alsasua is located. The protesters marched behind a banner with the slogan "Justice. It's not terrorism."

Relatives of the defendants at the march said they were not backing impunity but urged that justice be applied "without exaggeration, distortion and disproportion."

The Collective for the Victims of Terrorism, or COVITE, which is part of the prosecution in the trial, said Saturday's march and local officials' support for it was a further attack on the victims and "a clear abandonment" of them.

COVITE's lawyer, Miguel Mugica, told Cadena SER the attack on the officers should be seen as part of a "totalitarian climate that remains in the streets of the Basque Country and Navarra and that seeks to silence dissidents."

Amnesty International has said the violent aggression should be tried in a lower regional court in Navarra, and not at the National Court, which typically handles terrorism cases.

Inactive since 2011, ETA gave up on its remaining arsenal last year. Both France and Spain, where the group committed most of its deadly actions over more than 40 years, have demanded it take a further step and disband. </s> MADRID (AP) — Thousands of people marched Saturday in Madrid to support Catalan politicians and activists who are on trial for their attempts to secede from Spain in October 2017.

The nine defendants face decades in prison on rebellion and other charges for staging a banned independence referendum for the northeastern region and pushing ahead with an independence declaration that Madrid deemed unconstitutional.

Large pro-independence protests have filled the streets of Spain’s northeastern region of Catalonia and some European cities, but Saturday’s was the first major separatist march in the Spanish capital.

Organizers said 120,000 people attended, well beyond their expectations. Police put the number of marchers at around 18,000 and said no incidents were reported. It was not possible to reconcile the different crowd estimates.

A banner reading “Self-determination is not a crime” opened the demonstration, with Catalan politicians leading the way. Speaking to reporters at the scene, Catalonia’s regional president said the march in Madrid was needed in order to decry a trial that he described as a “farce.”

Many separatists in Catalonia believe the defendants in the Supreme Court case are political prisoners who are being tried for their ideas. Spain says the judicial process is fair and that its courts are fully independent from the government.

The trial is about to enter the fifth week of hearings. The proceedings in Madrid are being closely followed across the country, with media broadcasting live lengthy testimonies by defendants and witnesses and radios hosting in-depth debates about prosecution strategies.

A sentence is not expected until after Spain’s April 28 general election.

The issue of Catalan independence versus Spanish unity is a major topic for voters. The failed Catalan independence declaration in 2017 set off Spain’s most serious constitutional crisis in decades. </s> Llius Gene, AFP | Supporters of Catalan Independence demonstrate in Catalonia to demand the liberation of 12 jailed separatists on February 1, 2019.

As 12 Catalan separatist leaders prepare to go on trial in Madrid, Spain has been forced to defend the independence and impartiality of its courts.

Catalan separatists have dismissed the high-profile trial which begins Tuesday at Spain’s Supreme Court as a “farce” whose outcome is already pre-determined.

Not so, says the government, which has published a thick file to show Spain’s justice system is just as fair as its European counterparts, citing rankings by the European Commission, the European Court of Human Rights and Transparency International.

Supreme Court President Carlos Lesmes points out that if the justice system really was not independent, the king’s brother-in-law would not be in jail for corruption, nor would a court ruling have sparked a no-confidence motion that brought down the conservative government in June.

“I think this will be the most important trial we’ve had in democracy,” he told reporters before the start of the trial.

“It’s a challenge because there’s been a big smear campaign of Spain’s judiciary.”

Spain has had a long-standing public perception that its judiciary is biased.

In the EU’s 2018 “Justice Scoreboard”, Spain came sixth to last among 28 member states for public perception of the independence of judges and courts, behind Poland and Hungary.

Despite repeated denials, the conservative government in power at the time of Catalonia’s attempt to break from Spain in October 2017 and the Socialists that took power in June have each been accused of exerting pressure on judges.

“It is the state which will end up in the dock,” one of the main defendants on trial, former Catalan vice president Oriol Junqueras, predicted from pre-trial detention.

Junqueras and 11 others are on trial for their role in the attempt to break from Spain.

Separatists call them “political prisoners” who are suffering oppression of the kind experienced in Spain during Francisco Franco’s 1939-75 dictatorship.

In a ruling, Spain’s Supreme Court said the group were not on trial for their ideas.

The majority of the defendants were “political leaders who were members of the government of an autonomous region and therefore the highest representatives of the (Spanish) state in Catalonia”, it said.

The government has also had to defend itself from accusations that it put pressure on judges during the criminal investigation phase.

Public prosecutors accuse nine of the 12 of rebellion, which implies the use of violence a key charge which has divided Spanish legal experts.

But the state attorney decided in November to only accuse them of the lesser crime of sedition.

This has led conservative opposition parties, which take a hard line against Catalan separatism, to accuse the government of “unacceptable interference” in the case.

They suspect the move was part of a bid by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s minority government to win the much-needed support in parliament of Catalan separatist parties for its 2019 budget.

Justice Minister Dolores Delgado, though, said Spain’s new state attorney took the decision “without the government imposing anything”.

In November, a conservative senator, Ignacio Cosido, also contributed to perception that the judiciary is biased.

On WhatsApp, he welcomed the promotion of Manuel Marchena a judge seen as close to the conservatives who will be presiding at the separatists’ trial at the head of the Supreme Court.

Cosido said it would allow the conservatives to “control” the court “behind the scenes.”

After the controversy this generated, Marchena gave up the promotion.

Courts in Belgium, Germany and Switzerland have also contributed to doubts about Spain’s legal system by refusing to extradite separatists who had escaped after the declaration of independence.

A German court for instance last year refused to send former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont back to Spain on rebellion charges.

A Belgian court meanwhile has agreed to consider a civil lawsuit filed by Puigdemont’s lawyers against Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena, accusing him of [lacking] impartiality in the case against the Catalan separatist leaders.

Spain has not publicly criticised these decisions.

“Our best communication campaign will be the trial,” said Lesmes. </s> MADRID — The battle in court is coming to a close. But the political fight is just getting started.

The case against 12 Catalan leaders on charges that include violent rebellion and sedition is scheduled to conclude Wednesday, exactly four months after it began.

The defendants, nine of whom have been in preventive custody for over a year, have been on trial since February 12 for their participation in the Catalan regional government’s failed bid for independence in 2017.

Three of them — former Catalan Vice President Oriol Junqueras, the Catalan National Assembly’s Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart of the pro-independence Òmnium Cultural association — face potential jail sentences between 17 and 25 years if found guilty.

A verdict, and any resulting sentences, isn’t expected until the fall, after the court has reviewed the evidence provided by prosecutors, defendants and hundreds of witnesses. But the process has already deepened the fraught fault lines between Catalonia and Spanish authorities in Madrid.

Anger over the trial, accusations of bias and the detention of the high-profile defendants have given new life to Catalonia’s nationalists, whose spirits were sagging after their failed attempt to break away. And nationally, the issue continues to burn; it contributed to the fall of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government earlier this year.

The Supreme Court’s president has described the trial as “the most important that we have had in the democratic era.”

As the judicial process winds down and both sides await the verdict, the struggle to control the narrative and determine what happens next is already well under way.

Catalonia’s separatists may be outraged over a judicial process they have characterized as political persecution. But it comes at a good time for their cause.

Since their failed attempt to secede, the region’s separatists have focused their messaging on the judiciary's decision to keep nine of the 12 defendants behind bars.

Supporters have held a series of mass demonstrations and have hung yellow ribbons — symbolizing solidarity with the prisoners — in public spaces across the region. On several occasions, these displays have prompted clashes between Catalan nationalists and Spanish unionists, who oppose the region’s push to break away from Madrid.

“The biggest mobilizing factor for the independence cause over the last year or so has been the jailing of the defendants in the Supreme Court trial,” said Jordi Amat, a Catalan writer and commentator.

At a time when morale might otherwise have flagged, “the issue of the prisoners” has become a rallying cry.

Fury over the issue has benefited Catalonia’s inexperienced leader, Quim Torra, as he struggles to keep control of the independence movement.

Torra, who has said he is preparing for the trial’s verdict by consulting colleagues and grassroots independence organizations on how to respond to it, has suggested there will be a strong popular backlash if any of the defendants are found guilty.

“When we see the sentences, they might turn out to be another enormous mistake by the powers in Spain,” Catalan Foreign Minister Alfred Bosch told POLITICO.

“Obviously we won’t just sit there. We’ll have to react — we believe we are entitled to react in a civic, peaceful way.”

The trial’s outcome will also affect the institutional relationship between Catalonia and Madrid.

Since taking office last year, Sánchez has attempted to engage with the Catalan government, restoring a bilateral working group and holding regular meetings with Torra.

However, the prime minister's efforts to find common ground with Catalan lawmakers, offering to meet a long-held demand of the secessionists to appoint a facilitator in talks between pro-independence and pro-unity political parties, failed, triggering April's general election.

Having won that election, Sánchez is now attempting to form a new government. Crucially, he may be able to do so without the support of pro-independence parties, which would mean they no longer hold the political leverage they enjoyed during his first year in government.

Should that come to pass, some observers expect that Torra will look for other ways of exerting pressure on Madrid. One of them would be to respond to any guilty verdicts by calling a regional election to capitalize on public outrage over the trial and broaden the secessionist parties’ narrow majority in the Catalan parliament.

Complicating that plan, however, is the competition between the two leading Catalan nationalist forces. Holding another election would put Torra’s Junts per Catalunya at risk of losing support to its most dangerous rival, the similarly separatist Catalan Republican Left.

“We’ve got to where we are because neither of these two parties has wanted to be seen to be betraying its electoral support base,” said Oriol Bartomeus, a political scientist at Barcelona’s Autonomous University.

The two parties, he said, will be vying to prove “who is more committed to independence, who is willing to take more risks, who disobeys more.”

Heavy sentences for the defendants would add pressure on the two parties, who “wouldn’t be able to justify [reaching agreements with the Spanish government] to their supporters,” La Vanguardia columnist Lola García noted.

Benefits for the right

The resulting escalation would continue to force the Catalan issue up the national agenda, drawing attention from Sánchez’s agenda, which includes proposed reforms in areas such as euthanasia, workers’ rights and gender equality, as well as efforts to cement his status as a prominent and influential European leader.

That would benefit Spain’s fragmented and stridently unionist right. The center-right Popular Party, the liberal Ciudadanos and the far-right Vox party have all used the Catalan issue to attack Sánchez, with varying degrees of success.

The perceived threat to Spanish unity could, for example, help the Popular Party, which lost over half its congressional seats in the general election.

Sánchez’s government is already bracing itself for the likelihood that the trial’s legal fallout will drag on well beyond the fall, with appeals that could go as far as the European Court of Human Rights.

In addition to its potential to derail Sánchez’s agenda, the government also worries a protracted fight over Catalonia would damage Spain’s image internationally.

“For me this is much more than a mere battle of images,” said Irene Lozano, who heads up the Spanish government’s international image department, España Global. “For me it’s one of the biggest battles against disinformation in the world.”

The trial has already caught international attention, with the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention calling for several of the defendants to be freed and paid compensation. The plight of Catalan politicians also made a splash in Brussels last month, after elected members of the European Parliament from Catalonia who have escaped the Spanish justice system by living abroad were denied entry to the institution because Madrid has not yet filled out the paperwork that would have allowed them to enter.

The case “has helped the international community to understand what is happening and that this is not just a bunch of egotistical people who want to separate because they are wealthier [than other regions],” said Bosch, the region’s foreign minister.

The Spanish government questioned the timing of the U.N. findings, which came toward the end of the trial, and alleged that some members of the working group had a conflict of interest. The report was nevertheless a blow to Madrid, which has struggled to counter the independence movement’s slick PR machine.

An editorial on the progressive news site CTXT warned that although the end of the legal process is in sight, “it is doubtful that it will resolve the social conflict, improve co-existence or manage to cover up the fact that nobody has yet accepted political responsibility [for this crisis] on one side or the other.”
Thousands of people throughout Spain protest the court's verdict.