The Parliament's Board keeps the case open for the words of Vox deputy Alberto Tarradas about ERC deputy Najat Driouech, but the chamber's senior lawyer, Miquel Palomares, sees little room to pursue legal action through the courts.
The contradiction has been exposed in the latest meetings of the governing body. After the Board itself understood on April 30 that Tarradas had crossed "red lines" by implying in the hemicycle that Driouech "for the moment" would not be deported, the draft of the internal legal report concludes that freedom of expression in the parliamentary sphere has a very broad scope.
Palomares sees little criminal recourse due to broad parliamentary freedom of expression
Sources from the Table place that criterion at Monday's meeting, when Palomares explained that his draft points to a reduced margin to act against the ultra deputy. The legal key, according to that explanation, lies in the reinforced protection of interventions made within parliamentary activity.
The decision comes after Parliament had begun to study for the first time whether these episodes could leave the disciplinary or political sphere and end up in the courts. The step was opened after the plenary session in which Tarradas made the reference to a possible deportation of Driouech.
Even so, the Board has not closed the file. The body has commissioned two additional reports from criminal law experts external to the chamber to contrast the opinion of the senior lawyer before deciding if there is any basis to proceed.
The Board keeps the internal path open despite Tarradas' apologies
Tarradas apologized and her words were removed from the Official Journal of the plenary session. That move, however, did not stop the institutional response from the Parliament.
By oficio, the Board agreed to send the matter to the Committee on the Status of the Deputy, which must address the case in the parliamentary arena. The referral will now coexist with the wait for new external criminal reports.
On April 30, when it first assessed the scope of Tarradas's intervention, the Board held that the statements against Najat Driouech had crossed "red lines" that had not been crossed in the hemicycle until then.
That precedent led the body to explore for the first time a possible judicial way out for acts that occurred during a plenary session. For now, the draft presented by Miquel Palomares at Monday's meeting lowers that expectation and leaves the focus on the two external criminal reports that the Board has just commissioned.