There are already more ETA prisoners on semi-liberty than in ordinary regime. According to data managed by Sare, a citizen platform supporting the organization’s inmates, of the 118 who remained in Spanish and French penitentiary centers at the end of April, 73 of them (62%) already leave prison daily, either because they are in the so-called third degree or open regime, or because Article 100.2 of the Penitentiary Regime is applied to them, a rule that allows for greater flexibility in the living conditions in prison for those who are still in the second degree with exits from Monday to Friday.
Sources from the organization, which held an event this Saturday in the Gipuzkoan town of Mondragón (22,000 inhabitants), indicate that the collective aims for practically all ETA inmates to have been released or to enjoy one of the different forms of semi-liberty contemplated by the penitentiary system by the end of 2027. According to their estimates, by then it will be a small group, almost all convicted after the reform of the Penal Code that raised the maximum term of imprisonment for terrorism to 40 years, who will not have been able to achieve that prison situation.
At the event, former Basque Government minister Joseba Azkarraga, who acts as Sare’s spokesperson, recalled that in 2014, the year the platform emerged, there were 465 ETA prisoners, 140 of them in France, compared to just over a hundred today, with only two in French prisons. The platform highlighted that this quantitative change, but also qualitative due to the number of semi-liberties, has increased in recent years for two reasons.
On the one hand, due to what they call the “Basque penitentiary model,” launched by the Vitoria executive in a coalition between PNV and PSE after taking over the management of the three Basque prisons in October 2021. The Department of Justice and Human Rights of the Basque Government, now headed by socialist minister María Jesús San José, has since granted third degree to about a hundred prisoners and applied 100.2 to another twenty, although in some cases the Audiencia Nacional has revoked these decisions.
The second fact that, according to Sare, has influenced the reduction in the number of ETA prisoners, but also has brought others closer to aspiring to semi-liberty, is the legal reform approved unanimously in October 2024 by the Congress of Deputies, which allows prisoners to deduct from their sentences the time served for the same crime in prisons in other countries. Five ETA prisoners and one GRAPO prisoner have been released since its approval. Another unquantified group has seen their sentences reduced and, thus, their release brought closer. Sare sources indicate that there are still a dozen inmates who have requested its application, but the Audiencia Nacional has not agreed to it.
At the Mondragón event, the platform announced its intention for the traditional demonstration in favor of ETA prisoners, held every January in Bilbao, to be in 2027 “the culmination of a whole trajectory of social mobilization.” In the statement, read before 600 people, Sare left the door open to its dissolution: “It is healthy and responsible to imagine, also, in the near future a scenario in which Sare ceases to be necessary,” they stated.
Read more «Oh, the Pope is dressed as a Pope!»: two hours of waiting to see Leo XIV for a few seconds
