Vergés and Argimon, acquitted of the case for the vaccination of the covid to national police and civil guards

BarcelonaThe Barcelona Court acquits Alba Vergés and Josep Maria Argimon. The court that tried the two former Health ministers has exonerated them of the accusation that weighed upon them: "discriminating" against national police officers and civil guards in the covid vaccination campaign and vaccinating the Mossos d'Esquadra faster than them. The sentence, to which ARA has had access, also acquits the rest of the former department officials who sat on the defendants' bench: Marc Ramentol, Adrià Comella, and Xavier Rodríguez.

Furthermore, the court has ordered the police associations Jupol and Jucil, which acted as the prosecution in the proceedings and maintained their request for sentences of up to 15 years of disqualification until the end of the trial, when the Prosecutor's Office withdrew them, to pay the costs of the procedure. These two entities will have to take charge of the trial expenses, except for the defense of Xavier Rodríguez, the only one against whom they withdrew the accusation.

The three judges who signed the sentence base their reasoning on the fact that it has not been proven that the accused acted with the intention to discriminate, as would be necessary for the crime of prevarication of which they were accused to occur. This crime only applies to public officials or judges, and consists of intentionally issuing an unfair resolution, knowing that it contravenes the law.

In fact, the judges explain that this lack of intentionality among the former Health officials is compatible with the 2021 ruling in which the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) convicted the Generalitat, in the civil courts, for discriminating against the agents with the vaccination calendar and forced it to vaccinate them within a period of ten days. The sentence published this Monday, from the criminal jurisdiction, clarifies that a situation can be discriminatory without there being intention, an element that would be necessary for a criminal conviction. "We must rule on an unfair decision," they explain.

"Everything was prepared"

The judges insist that "it is not questionable that everything was prepared" to vaccinate the officers as soon as the vaccination centers and censuses were chosen. In fact, they recall that it was the affected police forces themselves that asked to be vaccinated outside the general vaccination system, because they preferred to receive the doses in their own facilities instead of receiving them in public health centers. The judges also point out that creating the censuses of officers to be vaccinated was much easier in the case of the Mossos d'Esquadra and the local police, because the Generalitat already has their data. Furthermore, they make it clear that the vaccination with AstraZeneca, which was the one the police were receiving, was suspended when it was decided to prioritize the population over 60 years of age and after cases of thrombosis as side effects.

Beyond the specific circumstances that interfered with the pace of vaccination, the judges highlight that analyzing this case has been especially complicated taking into account that the vaccination process itself already entailed "evident difficulties," not only in the case of the police. "As anyone who lived through such a tumultuous time knows, situations of paralysis occurred in the implementation of the vaccines. The fear of side effects caused the vaccination with certain vaccines to be suspended, and this necessarily implied delays," the judges explain.