A judicial veto for Sortu

On Tuesday the Spanish Supreme Court gave the go ahead to legal action brought by the Prosecutor's Office against the registration of Sortu, the name recently chosen by the radical Basque separatist party Batasuna for its attempt to run candidates in the municipal elections in May. Batasuna has been unable to run in elections since 2003 when it was outlawed under the Political Parties Law for its dependence on the terrorist organization ETA.

In the Basque nationalist media the government has been accused of cowardice for remitting this matter to the decision of the courts, instead of directly permitting the registration. On the other side, the anti-nationalist media has accused the government of having timidly declined to use the more expeditious means at its disposal to stop Sortu in its tracks directly. However, the decision to channel the matter into the courts is the most prudent one.

This is so not only because it is preferable that the decision enjoy the backing of the Supreme Court (and, in the event of an appeal, the Constitutional Court), but because the question is one that can really only be resolved by a court.

Specifically, it needs to be decided whether the criterion for registration is to be that of the procedure deriving from the ruling (that of Batasuna's outlawing in 2003), which considers that any attempt to give continuity to the outlawed party constitutes a circumvention of the law; or whether certain considerations - established in rulings by the same courts concerning the conditions (a definitive condemnation of terrorist violence) under which members of an outlawed party can proceed to create a legal party - are applicable.

In order for the decision to be that of the courts, the government had to challenge the new registration, adducing reasons for doing so. The reasons thus adduced are of widely differing weight.

Some are obvious in the extreme, such as the fact that the persons present at the public presentation of Sortu included many leaders and ex-leaders of Batasuna. Others offer reasoned substantiation for the attitude of distrust of Sortu on the part of the government and the principal political parties. For example, the fact that the spokesmen for the promoters of Sortu adopt the expression "democratic process," habitually used by ETA in counterdistinction to "peace process," which ETA identified with "peace without content" - that is, peace without previous negotiation on a change in the political system, as a precondition for ending terrorism.

The public hearing demanded by the Prosecutor's Office will allow both sides to contrast, and not just voice, their arguments on this decisive question of whether there exists a continuity with the politico-military strategy that ETA considers non-negotiable. And the Prosecutor's Office must demand clarification as to the meaning of the ambiguous expressions used in the party statutes, and of other elements that, under the terms of the Political Parties Law, must be taken into account. For example, the silence of Sortu regarding the recent arrest of an ETA commando with 200 kilos of explosives.