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Discrimination and the Roma Community 2014
3. The case of Xavier García Albiol v.
Romanian Roma from Badalona:
“Anything goes is unacceptable in political discourse”
Óscar Vicario García.
Lawyer.
I, as a lawyer, find it hard to imagine just how diffi-
cult, if not impossible, it must have been to get to the
truth in the legal suit filed against the current Mayor of
Badalona, Xavier García Albiol, for his insistent, publicly
disseminated, racist and xenophobic insults against the
Romanian Roma community of his city, even though
this truth is clear and public knowledge. Racist and xe-
nophobic insults made and publicly disseminated as
part of a deliberate strategy, launched the offending
politician into the Mayor’s Office of Catalonia’s third
most important city.
But even more mind-boggling was how, once “the legal
truth” had been established, the overwhelming majority
of Spanish judges and magistrates failed to interpret
said truth in accordance with European law and with the
interpretation of fundamental rights by the European
Court of Human Rights.
I.
Initiation of the proceeding and difficulties
in initiating oral proceedings.
I have been following the politician in question since
May 2007 and am familiar with his tendency to link all
types of immigration to crime and insecurity.
But it was not until the beginning of 2010 that Mr. Albiol
initiated an incessant anti-immigration campaign with
no scruples or limits. With the deliberate objective of
getting himself elected as mayor, he made it very clear
that he would keep irregular immigrants from being able
to register at the Town Hall and continued with his pub-
lic campaign insulting the Romanian Roma of Badalona
and disseminating massive amounts of false information
about them: calling them a plague and cancer, accusing
them of coming to Spain for the sole purpose of com-
mitting crime, of causing insecurity, being dirty, delin-
quent and bad neighbours. These are just some of the
things he said in reference to this group which, and this
tops them all, he said would never be able to integrate
into society.
In light of these facts, and although the Barcelona Hate
Crime Public Prosecutor was already six months into an
investigation of Mr. Albiol, in my opinion he had com-
mitted a crime under Article 510(2) of the Criminal Code
punishing those who:
“aware of the falsehood or reckless disdain for the truth,
disseminate damaging information regarding groups or
associations based on their ideology, religion or belief,
ethnic group or race, national origin, sex, sexual orienta-
tion, disease or disability.”
It was relatively clear that what we have here is a crime
of dissemination of collective slander with reckless dis-
dain for the truth, and that this constituted eventual
fraud as a subjective element of the crime; at the time
the crime was committed, Mr. Albiol was a candidate
for the mayor’s office. And naturally, politicians in the
opposition do not have the same information as those
in office. As proof of this, when Mr. Albiol was elected
mayor he could verify that the insulting information that
he himself had disseminated was false.
According to the statistics and data that I furnished for
the hearing from the National Statistics Institute (INE),
in 2010 Badalona had a population of 1,017 people of
Romanian nationality. For that same hearing, Mr. Albiol,
as Mayor and therefore head of the city’s Local Police
force, submitted a report that he himself had commis-
sioned showing that 88 Romanian residents had been
arrested in 2010, a number that mysteriously grew to
248 at the oral proceedings stage. These figures refer
to Romanians and not necessarily Roma. Maybe he was
mixing figures.
These statistics show, beyond a shadow of a doubt (as
we had asserted from the beginning), that Mr. Albiol had
acted with reckless disdain for the truth.