The Parliament will be able to sanction hate speech

BarcelonaPSC-Units, Junts, ERC, Comuns, and CUP have reached an agreement to reform the Parliament's regulations and incorporate the Catalan 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 would clarify reprimands based on the severity of the facts and the work, which falls to the Committee on the Deputy's Statute and the board. Furthermore, the inclusion of the Code of Conduct within the regulations would safeguard sanctions from potential judicial appeals. The text will be registered this Wednesday in the chamber with the intention of it being debated and approved in the autumn, when the political term resumes.

The pact 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 Deputy's Statute qualified Orriols and Garriga's words as minor offenses for violating Article 7 of the chamber's Code of Conduct.

Orriols's case, opened at the request of ERC in April 2025, sanctions her for accusing the Republican deputy Najat Driouech of making "an ostentatious display of 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 socialists of spending money on "drugs and prostitutes", and in October he hung posters and called the executed former president Lluís Companys an "assassin".

The main obstacle until now 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 sanctioning regime, does not have legal standing, which complicated its application if the sanction ended up being appealed before the courts. For this reason, after Orriols's remarks, the parties that have agreed to the reform began to work on it by incorporating the sanctions into the text of the regulations themselves. A reform that will be validated by the plenary session because the signatories have a comfortable majority. The intention is to avoid the modification coinciding with the municipal election pre-campaign and it becoming political ammunition for the far right.