In a historic ruling, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has overturned the conviction handed down by the Supreme Court against several protesters from the “Aturem el Parlament” (Stop the Parliament) mobilization of 2011. The ruling represents a blow to the argument of magistrate Manuel Marchena regarding the fact that, even though the accused did not commit specific violent physical acts, they helped to create, with their mere presence and gestures, an intimidating atmosphere and hindered the functioning of the Catalan chamber.This is the doctrine of "environmental violence" that Marchena himself was in charge of transferring to the Procés sentence. According to this doctrine, even if an individual protester does not commit explicit acts of physical aggression, their participation and integration into a hostile collective mass contributes to creating an intimidating and coercive atmosphere capable of paralyzing or altering the functioning of institutions. To me, this invention by the judge from the Canary Islands seemed at the time as creative as the "stage fright" that Jorge Valdano spoke of in the 1980s, referring to the intimidating atmosphere of the Santiago Bernabéu stadium. Of course, with very different and painful consequences. Not in vain, with this convoluted argument, the Supreme Court overturned in 2015 the previous ruling of the National Court by which the eighteen defendants of the siege of the Parliament were acquitted, arguing that they were exercising their right to peaceful protest against social cuts. Eight of them were sentenced to three years in prison.Now, the Strasbourg Court has decided that criminally punishing protesters based on a general intimidating atmosphere violated the fundamental rights of assembly, demonstration, and freedom of expression, in addition to highlighting that the convicted individuals were not attributed in the sentence any individual violent action or direct incitement to violence. That is to say, the mere fact of shouting slogans or raising arms in a protest, which needless to say always generates disturbances, does not justify disproportionate prison sentences.The relevant point is that this ruling sets a precedent for Spanish courts in the sense of preventing them from using abstract concepts to deactivate the right to protest or peaceful civil disobedience. It is a pity that this same assessment was not made by the ECHR when in November 2025 it reviewed and ruled on the 2019 Procés sentence, in which Marchena recycled this same dogmatic scheme to justify, in a delusional way, the existence of the insurrectional climate necessary to commit the crime of sedition, still in force at that time.
Indeed, the Supreme Court rescued the same doctrine from the Parliament siege case to describe the peaceful mobilizations of September 20th in front of the Department of Economy and the gatherings at polling stations during the October 1st referendum. At that time, the Spanish high court ruled that the existence of “human walls” and collective attitudes of rejection created a massive environmental coercion, and this served to justify that the “public and tumultuous uprising” mentioned in the Criminal Code at the time had occurred, and it penalized passive resistance in block as a form of force.Unfortunately, as we have said, the European court endorsed the actions of the Spanish justice system in this case and ruled out that the fundamental rights of the plaintiffs had been violated. Subsequently, it rejected the same request before the Grand Chamber. This shows that the Procés was a matter of state and, therefore, also a European one, since something as sacred to some states as territorial integrity was at stake. There was, therefore, no other path than that of amnesty to repair the damage caused. If this were not the case, the fact that two Supreme Court rulings had used the same conceptual construct of violence or environmental malice, now questioned for being unpredictable and disproportionate, should have also led to the annulment of its theoretical basis and automatically weakened the legal foundation of the Procés ruling. The arguments in favor of the fact that Strasbourg had to act consistently seem incontestable: in accordance with the principle of criminal legality, criminal responsibility must be strictly individual, and punishing someone for the violence of third parties by appealing to the collective environment violates Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights.Of course, there has been no shortage of voices within the Spanish legal right that have justified the ECHR's different way of acting. They have argued that, in the Aturem el Parlament case, ordinary activists were being judged, while in the Procés, the actions of government officials and social leaders who had control of the public agenda, institutional capacity, and responsibility for mass mobilizations were being determined. Furthermore, they assert that in the two rulings there were differentiated proven facts: the one regarding the Procés was not limited to describing an "environment," but rather attributed to the defendants the planning of a roadmap that aimed to instrumentalize citizen mobilization outside of judicial mandates. In short, tall tales to evade the gravity and the effects of a devastating ruling.
