According to information from the Communication Office of the Audiencia Nacional on Tuesday, November 15, 2016, the Criminal Court has acquitted the councilman of Madrid Guillermo Zapata of the crime of humiliation to victims of terrorism for which he had been tried. The Chamber understands that the comments made on the social network twitter fit within the macabre humor but not in the criminal type of crime of humiliation to victims of terrorism.
In its sentence, the Third Section of the Criminal Court contextualizes Zapata’s comment in the context of other tweets where he spoke of different types of victims, such as Jews and the young Marta del Castillo. Some comments, which according to the judges, indicate that rather than humiliating the victims of terrorism, they were debates “in the form of macabre jokes, using the identity of victims of criminal acts”.
The sentence recalls that the doctrine of the SC requires for the objective element of this crime to be present, that acts involving contempt, discredit or humiliation of the victims of terrorism take place and that in no case would they fit within the freedom of expression; a situation that does not occur in the specific case “since it is a phrase that links the victim Irene Villa with other unfortunate victims of criminal acts that ended their lives, but from which the injurious intent is not perceived, given the lack of continuity, which would place us in the context of a debate, which eliminates the renewed focus of aggravation required by the criminal type “performance of acts,” since the comment that followed places us before the victims of the Holocaust.
The magistrates conclude that the comments made by Zapata are surely “reprehensible for the unfortunate selection of the victims of criminal acts who are the protagonists”, but “on another plane, different from that of criminal legality”.
