The Congress cautiously suspends Vito Quiles and prepares his expulsion

MadridAfter years of complaints from both parliamentary journalists and deputies, Congress has decided to ban Vito Quiles from entering. The progressive majority of the lower house's Board has agreed to provisionally suspend the press accreditation of the ultra agitator, linked to Javier Negre's EDA TV platform, due to the accumulation of complaints about his behavior, which contravenes the rules required of media workers. Congress has nine official complaints against him on the table and is awaiting the resolution of these proceedings which point towards his expulsion. The Board has also decided to apply the same provisional suspension to the ultra agitator Bertrand Ndongo.

The Congress's decision contrasts with the treatment Quiles receives in the Senate, which has an absolute PP majority and where there is permissiveness. The ultra agitator, who even participated in an electoral event for the Popular Party in Aragon, will be able to remain accredited as a journalist in the upper house even if he cannot attend Congress for a while. In the Senate, he staged another incident, which even went to court although it has since been archived, against analyst Sarah Santaolalla, whom he pursued upon leaving an event with shoves and shouts.

Precedent in Parliament

In Catalonia, accreditations to journalists have also been temporarily withdrawn. The Generalitat withdrew it in 2021 from Xavier Rius, director of E-Notícies, for "continued disrespect towards the institution" and for "belittling the spokesperson" and "denigrating women in general". The last straw was a question to the former government spokesperson Patrícia Plaja about a tasteless joke that two TV3 comedians had made mixing Queen Letizia, Princess Leonor, and oral sex, which the channel decided not to broadcast, but which was leaked. "Can you imagine me telling you now that what I would like is for you to lick it?", Rius retorted.

Just two months later, the High Court of Justice of Catalonia accepted the precautionary measure requested by Rius, so that, while the proceedings were being processed, the withdrawal of the accreditation was suspended because it was considered that the resolution adopted by the then Secretary of Communication, Oriol Duran, exceeded his powers. In 2022, the court dismissed the Government's appeal and ratified in a final judgment that the Generalitat had violated "the fundamental right to receive truthful information" and ordered the institution to pay 2,000 euros in costs.

For its part, Parliament did decide not to renew Rius's parliamentary accreditation in 2024, when he left the direction of E-Notícies and was already working as a freelance through his YouTube channel, arguing that accreditations had to be linked to a formally accredited media outlet and that it was not enough to present oneself as a "youtuber" or independent creator.