Congress definitively withdraws press accreditation from Vito Quiles

BarcelonaCongress has decided to definitively withdraw Vito Quiles' accreditation as a journalist. The bureau of the lower house took this decision after it had already decided to provisionally suspend his press accreditation in May and withdrew it for three months. This Tuesday, the progressive majority of the Congress bureau decided to definitively withdraw his accreditation after analyzing the legal counsel's proposal. Specifically, three very serious offenses were taken into account: "obstruction of press conferences and dissemination on social media of images obtained by violating the house's rules," parliamentary sources point out. The PP did not vote on the decision taken by the Congress bureau this Tuesday.

"Reiteration while already suspended for previous serious infractions means that each of the three new infractions now resolved is classified as very serious, and each of them entails the definitive withdrawal of accreditation," the same sources report. That is to say, the Congress bureau had already provisionally suspended the accreditation of Quiles, linked to Javier Negre's EDA TV platform, due to the accumulation of complaints regarding his behavior. In fact, there were up to nine complaints against him that had to be resolved, which pointed towards his definitive expulsion if the sanctioning regime of the new parliamentary regulations were applied.

Quiles' interruptions at parliamentary group press conferences in Congress had long been common, in addition to intimidation of journalists and politicians from left-wing groups. One of the files opened against him that was most advanced was the unauthorized recording of images of former President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in December of last year. Congress staff warned him that it was forbidden to record the former socialist leader in that restricted area and to publish them, but he recorded and uploaded them to social media anyway.