High Court shelves case against Madrid councilor over offensive tweets

Spain’s National High Court has decided to shelve a case against short-lived Madrid culture chief Guillermo Zapata over offensive statements he published on Twitter four years ago.

Judge Santiago Pedraz said the 2011 tweets, in which the future councilor for the leftist Ahora Madrid bloc made fun of victims of Basque terrorist group ETA and the Holocaust, did not constitute the committing of “any crime, represent any especially perverse form of behavior, nor present any specific malice.”

Neither did they humiliate a victim of terrorism, the judge added, in reference to Zapata’s comments about Irene Villa, an ETA victim who lost both legs in a car bomb attack when she was 12 years old.

Pursuing such conduct would mean having to do so in relation to everyone who has published similar jokes” High Court Judge Santiago Pedraz

The prosecutor had charged that the tweets posted by Zapata – which included messages such as “They’ve had to shut down Alcàsser cemetery so Irene Villa won’t go in to get replacement parts” – were “humiliating and degrading.”

Alcàsser is a town in Valencia that made headline news in 1992 when three local teenage girls were abducted, tortured, raped and killed by two men, one of whom was never caught.

Zapata was last month forced to resign his position as new Madrid Mayor Manuela Carmena’s culture chief just 48 hours after taking charge over the offensive messages, which also included tweets such as: “How do you fit five million Jews into a Fiat 600 [a tiny car popular in the 1960s and 70s]? Answer: in the ashtray.”

Zapata, who retained his position as councilor, claimed the message had been posted in the context of a debate about the limits of humor.

Judge Pedraz explained that in the case of the Villa tweet it “contained an ‘isolated’ sentence, without anything else, neither explanations nor comments.”

The intention behind it was simply “black humor,” he added, “especially in view of the other tweets published and the reaction of Villa herself,” in reference to the fact that she had seemed to take the comments with good humor and even retweeted jokes about her and the attack she suffered.

Pedraz explained that the law could not only pursue certain people, such as Zapata, “and not others, as seems to be the case here.”

“Pursuing such forms of conduct would mean having to do so in relation to everyone who has published similar jokes on the social networks and internet,” he said.

The messages did not constitute “any crime, nor represent any especially perverse form of behavior,” the judge said

Nevertheless, Pedraz noted that “this kind of humor does create perplexity and indignation in a wide sector of society, above all among those who have been affected by terrorism, and as in the case of the Dignity and Justice Association [the group that filed the criminal complaint], which defends the legitimate interests of victims of terrorism.”

Madrid City Hall praised the “very positive” decision to drop the investigation into Zapata, which is nevertheless not final and could still be appealed. “Common sense has prevailed,” said council spokeswoman Rita Maestre, who is herself the target of a court case over offensive behavior at a religious act in 2011.

The municipal government above all wanted to give its thanks to Villa, “a magnificent and generous person who has shown greater high-mindedness than others who have wanted to use the pain of victims for political ends.”