The Parliament will be able to sanction hate speech

BarcelonaThe PSC, Junts, ERC, Comuns, and CUP have reached an agreement to reform the Parliament's regulations and incorporate the chamber's Code of Conduct, which outlines possible sanctions for deputies who violate it, as reported this Wednesday by El Periódico and confirmed by ARA. The reform, aimed at protecting against hate speech, would clarify reprimands based on the seriousness of the acts and the work, which falls to the Committee on the Status of the Deputy and the board: from 600 to 6,000 euros for serious infractions and from 6,001 to 12,000 euros for very serious ones.

Furthermore, including the Code of Conduct within the regulations would shield sanctions from potential judicial appeals. "The present modification of the Regulations of the Parliament of Catalonia aims to provide the chamber with adequate normative instruments to confront manifestations of discriminatory, offensive, or hate-inciting speech that may occur within the framework of parliamentary activity," states the text, which was registered this Wednesday in the chamber with the intention of being debated and approved in the autumn, when the political course resumes. The text defends freedom of expression, but makes it clear that it cannot be protected "when it is used with the intention of destroying, contradicting, or despising the human rights of people or the essential values on which the democratic order is based."

The agreement to reform the Parliament's regulations comes the day after the chamber publicly reprimanded the leader of Aliança Catalana, Sílvia Orriols, and the parliamentary spokesperson for Vox, Joan Garriga, for violating the Code of Conduct. The board made the decision after, two weeks ago, the Committee on the Status of the Deputy qualified Orriols' and Garriga's words as minor offenses for violating article 7 of the chamber's Code of Conduct.

Orriols' file, opened at the request of ERC in April 2025, sanctions her for accusing the Republican deputy Najat Driouech of displaying "Islamic misogyny" for wearing a veil. Garriga, on the other hand, receives a double sanction for two controversies in the hemicycle in 2025: in May he accused the socialists of spending money on "drugs and prostitutes", and in October he posted posters and called the executed ex-president Lluís Companys an "assassin".

The main obstacle so far in sanctioning deputies who violated the code of conduct was that the foreseen sanctions were not legally protected. The chamber's code of conduct, which includes the disciplinary regime, does not have legal status, which complicated its application if the sanction ended up being appealed before the courts. For this reason, after Orriols's words, the groups that have agreed to the reform began to work on it, incorporating the sanctions into the text of the regulation itself. A reform that will be validated by the plenary session because the signatories have a comfortable majority. The intention is to prevent the modification from coinciding with the pre-campaign for the municipal elections and becoming political ammunition for the far-right.