Communist Party of the Basque Homelands

The Communist Party of the Basque Homelands (Basque: Euskal Herrialdeetako Alderdi Komunista, EHAK; Spanish: Partido Comunista de las Tierras Vascas, PCTV) was a Marxist–Leninist and Basque nationalist party in the Basque Autonomous Community of Spain. It grew out of Euskal Herriko Komunistak, a communist current in the reorganization of Batasuna, and made its statutes public on 29 July 2002, about a month after Spain published Organic Law 6/2002 on political parties. The Ministry of the Interior registered the party that September. The statutes aimed at a “Republic of Euskadi” by what they called lawful means, and they also set out self-determination for the Basque people and the political unity of the Basque lands. In 2003 the Supreme Court of Spain used the 2002 law to dissolve Herri Batasuna, Euskal Herritarrok and Batasuna.

EHAK was scarcely known until the election to the Basque Parliament on 17 April 2005. After the Constitutional Court confirmed the annulment of the Aukera Guztiak grouping of electors as a successor to Batasuna, the party offered its lists to citizens who shared what it called principles of “democracy and peace” and of civil and political rights. On 8 April 2005 Arnaldo Otegi, as Batasuna’s spokesman, asked supporters to vote for EHAK and to campaign for it, describing the list as the only legal ballot then “in absolute harmony” with Batasuna’s proposed exit from the political and armed conflict. The same day the attorney general, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, said investigators had not yet found enough evidence to seek EHAK’s illegalization, while calling the party a “lifeline” for Batasuna’s electorate. On the count of every polling station published that night, EHAK had 150,188 votes, 12.5 percent, and nine of the 75 seats. El País described the result as inheriting and surpassing Batasuna’s vote. The deputies sat as the Ezker Abertzalea group. At the investiture on 23 June 2005, two of them voted for Juan José Ibarretxe of the Basque Nationalist Party to continue as lehendakari, and the other seven abstained.

While the group sat in Vitoria-Gasteiz, its representatives refused to condemn attacks by ETA and said only that they opposed all violations of human rights. On 8 February 2008 Judge Baltasar Garzón, at the Audiencia Nacional, suspended the activities of EHAK and of Acción Nacionalista Vasca for three years, holding that both had become instruments of Batasuna and a means of financing its leaders.

On 18 September 2008 the Supreme Court’s special chamber for the parties law, sixteen magistrates sitting unanimously, declared EHAK illegal and ordered its dissolution, upholding demands from the public prosecutor and the state’s attorney. Enrique Bacigalupo was the rapporteur, and the written judgment was expected to be notified the following Monday. El País, drawing on the court’s account of the case, reported that the decisive grounds were financial and strategic: a common course with Batasuna and Acción Nacionalista Vasca, the use of an EHAK office to keep invoices of prominent Batasuna members, widespread hiring of people who held relevant posts in the banned party, and salary payments totalling 27,000 euros that helped those leaders subsist. EHAK was the third formation dissolved under the 2002 law, two days after Acción Nacionalista Vasca. The nine deputies kept their seats, which attach to the person elected, but they had to dissolve the Ezker Abertzalea group and could join the mixed group.

Origins and registration

Euskal Herriko Komunistak

The party later registered as Euskal Herrialdeetako Alderdi Komunista (EHAK; in Spanish, Partido Comunista de las Tierras Vascas, PCTV) was described by its promoters as growing out of Euskal Herriko Komunistak (EHK), a small Marxist current in the abertzale left. In the 2000–2001 refoundation through which Herri Batasuna and Euskal Herritarrok became Batasuna, EHK tabled Igitaia eta Mailua (“The Sickle and the Hammer”), which received 61 assembly votes and pressed a class-struggle line together with the simultaneous building of socialism and a Basque state.

A Guardia Civil report published in April 2005 named José Antonio Egido as the author and José Luis Barros, an Euskal Herritarrok councillor in Irun, as the speaker who defended the text. It quoted EHK — “Herri Batasuna has to be the great house of the abertzales and also of the communists” — and described the current as not questioning the armed activity of ETA. Juan Carlos Ramos, later EHAK’s president, called the party the “old EHK movement.” In the 2008 dissolution case the party denied both that origin and any past as an internal current of Batasuna.

Foundation and inscription

The general statutes were executed in Bilbao on 29 July 2002 before the notary Juan Ramón Manzano Malaxchevarría, a month after Organic Law 6/2002 took effect on 29 June. The promoters were Juan Carlos and Javier Ramos Sánchez, Aritz Blázquez Díez and Juan Manuel Rodríguez Fernández. They told El País that the aim was an orthodox Basque communist party for revolutionary Marxist groups in the Basque Country and Navarre, and that they chose legal registration because the new law’s difficulties for Batasuna would open a space that had not existed before. The statutes sought class struggle, self-determination, political unity, socialism through the dictatorship of the proletariat and the “progressive elimination of the State, capital and social classes,” by lawful means only.

The application to the Register of Political Parties at the Ministry of the Interior was filed on 12 August 2002, the day prosecutors opened an inquiry into Batasuna and the state legal service finished its dissolution report on Herri Batasuna, Euskal Herritarrok and Batasuna. The People’s Party and the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party formally started that procedure the next day. José Ramón Ónega, Director-General of Interior Policy, saw possible grounds for refusal: initials close to Euskal Herritarrok; aims of Basque political unity, including the territories in France, and of “the progressive elimination of the State”; and institutional, mass-movement and ideological fronts compared with the Koordinadora Abertzale Sozialista in an Audiencia Nacional order of 26 August. Under the 2002 law, signs of criminal unlawfulness stopped the twenty-day registration clock and required a reference to the Fiscalía; the ministry could not dissolve a party. On 25 September the Fiscalía found that the statutes alone did not show sufficient indications of an offence under article 515 of the Penal Code, and returned the file.

EFE, and later Público, dated the register entry to 27 September 2002, about a month after the Congress of Deputies, by 295 votes to 10 with 29 abstentions, asked the government of José María Aznar to sue for Batasuna’s dissolution. The press dates do not all match: El País wrote 9 September on 9 April 2005, which conflicts with the August filing and the fiscal opinion; a 4 May account, from an Interior report, placed Ignacio Astarloa’s admission in October. Ónega later said officials had seen a “legal fiction” of Batasuna, while Interior Minister Ángel Acebes could only delay registration and send evidence to a court. The party was already registered when, on 27 March 2003, the Supreme Court of Spain dissolved Herri Batasuna, Batasuna and Euskal Herritarrok.

EHAK contested neither the 2003 municipal elections nor the 2004 general and European elections. Police and Guardia Civil reports of 24 March 2005 found no public activity and no sign that it would be an abertzale list on 17 April; El País wrote of a few dozen militants. In 2008 the prosecution described nearly three years without an election campaign; the party said not standing had been mistaken for political inactivity.

Ideology and statutes

Programme

The statutes of Euskal Herrialdeetako Alderdi Komunista (EHAK), the Partido Comunista de las Tierras Vascas (PCTV), were signed before a notary in Bilbao on 29 July 2002 and registered at the Ministry of the Interior that September. El País, quoting them, reported that the party stood for "class struggle... as an element of revolutionary social transformation", the "right to self-determination" and "the political unity" of the Basque people, "the realisation of socialism in the dictatorship of the proletariat" and "the progressive elimination of the state, capital and social classes", always "by lawful political means". Unlike internal documents, the paper said, the statutes did not justify the violence of ETA and proposed reaching the dictatorship of the proletariat or a "Republic of Euskadi" by "the procedure regulated for that purpose in the Constitution of 1978". The promoters, unlike the more nationalist majority of the abertzale left, wanted socialism and a Basque state built together. The prosecutor's 2008 dissolution claim called that aim a "democratic republic of workers and peasants of Euskal Herria", reached by the constitutional procedure. Basque Nationalist Party president Josu Jon Imaz mocked a programme which, "in the full twenty-first century", spoke of "the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the peasantry".

The text differed from earlier statements of Euskal Herriko Komunistak (EHK). El País, using a Civil Guard compilation, reported that after ETA ended its ceasefire in December 1999 an EHK manifesto blamed the Spanish state for "whatever may happen" unless the Lizarra terms were followed, and that a November 2001 interview called ETA "a political organisation that practises armed struggle" against the states' "monopoly of violence". The prosecutor argued that EHAK later moved toward banned Batasuna and treated self-determination as the only solution to the "political conflict in Euskal Herria". In September 2008 the Supreme Court of Spain held that article 2, on participation "by lawful political means", was too generic under the Political Parties Law to reject equivocal messages, and that class struggle did not itself separate the programme from the Batasuna discourse behind that party's dissolution.

Statements on political violence

EHAK opposed every violation of human rights and would not condemn ETA by name. On 13 April 2005 Miren Nekane Erauskin told El Mundo that "condemning or not condemning ETA solves nothing" and that the party was "against the violation of all human rights": "the violence of ETA, of the Civil Guard, of the dispersal of prisoners and so many others" had to be overcome, because "we are not going to differentiate between violences". Asked about the 1997 murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco, she said a condemnation "positions one on one of the sides of the conflict".

The Basque Parliament met the same refusal. On 9 February 2007 it condemned "the plans designed by ETA" against the Basque Y; EHAK voted against four points, did not vote the condemnation of the threats, and Julián Martínez called the text an excuse to "criminalise and delegitimise the popular movement" against the line. After ETA killed former socialist councillor Isaías Carrasco in Mondragón on 7 March 2008, every group but EHAK rejected on 14 March "the criminal attack by ETA" and called for its "immediate dissolution"; EHAK did not sign, but did not refuse to have the text read. On 6 June 2008, after attacks on contractors in Zarautz and Hernani, the chamber condemned them "with the utmost firmness". EHAK did not vote, and Óscar Rodríguez of the Socialist Party of the Basque Country said it lacked the "courage" to leave "the chains that bind it to terrorism".

The Supreme Court later cited Carrasco and the attacks on firms building the line as cases in which EHAK had not "expressly condemned the authors and the violence". Opposition to the railway was not, it wrote, decisive: other legal parties, including Ezker Batua, shared it, and that did not imply violent means. Citing the Constitutional Court of Spain, the chamber held that a "generic condemnation of the violation of human rights" did not offset signs of continuity with a banned party.

The 2005 Basque parliamentary election

The annulment of Aukera Guztiak

The election to the Basque Parliament was held on 17 April 2005, with 25 deputies in each historic territory and a 3 percent threshold in each. The candidacy excluded before the campaign was not EHAK but Aukera Guztiak ("All Options"), an agrupación de electores whose lists the boards of Álava, Gipuzkoa and Biscay proclaimed on 22 March. The State Attorney, for the Spanish government, and the Public Prosecutor challenged those proclamations in the special chamber of the Supreme Court of Spain under article 61 of the Organic Law of the Judiciary.

On 26 March 2005 the chamber, 16 magistrates sitting unanimously, annulled the proclamations. Article 44.4 of the Organic Law on the General Electoral Regime, added by the 2002 Political Parties Law, bars a grouping that in fact continues or succeeds a party declared illegal. Reporting judge Román García Varela's opinion held that Aukera Guztiak continued Batasuna. It cited ETA bulletins, a prison recording of Batasuna's Elisabet Zubiaga and ETA prisoner Jorge García Sertucha discussing a "double list" to evade judicial control, and the candidates' refusal to reject terrorism unequivocally. The court also blocked delivery of the electoral register.

Aukera Guztiak sought amparo on 28 March. On 31 March the Second Chamber of the Constitutional Court of Spain dismissed it unanimously in judgment 68/2005, with Pascual Sala Sánchez as reporting judge. Citing the short electoral deadlines and its judgments 85/2003 and 99/2004, the chamber found no breach of participation, defence or ideological freedom and upheld the finding that the grouping succeeded an illegal party. Aukera Guztiak did not stand.

Campaign and endorsement

On 8 April 2005, at a press conference in San Sebastián, Arnaldo Otegi said banned Batasuna would withdraw its lists and ask supporters to vote for EHAK, also known as PCTV. He called it "the only ballot paper and the only legal option" then "in absolute tune, not with Batasuna's ideological and political criteria, but with the process of overcoming the political and armed conflict" that Batasuna was proposing, and said a vote for it would advance "a process for peace and democracy". He said the national executive had decided after about 180 meetings with more than 5,000 militants, and he asked that base to campaign for the lists.

The previous week EHAK had offered its lists to anyone sharing "democracy and peace" and "civil and political rights". Its candidates then accepted the call. Maite Aranburu, head of the Biscay list, called it "an extraordinary boost to the demands for peace and democracy". With Nekane Erauskin, head of the Gipuzkoa list, she spoke of a "historic opportunity" and of making the party "the meeting point of all the reds of Euskal Herria". Erauskin said they would not meet Batasuna during the campaign. Peace, democracy and civil and political rights, without a condemnation of ETA, were the programme offered to voters.

The government asked the State Attorney to examine action against EHAK. Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido said prosecutors were working hard but still lacked "sufficient data for illegalization", and he called the party a "lifeline" for Batasuna's vote. Police and Civil Guard reports of 24 March, written before Otegi's announcement, had found no sign of contacts with Batasuna or ETA's milieu. The People's Party demanded an immediate challenge.

Results and the parliamentary group

EHAK won nine of 75 seats, and two of its deputies' votes decided the June election of the lehendakari. There was no single community-wide lead candidate: Karmele Berasategi headed the Álava list, Maite Aranburu the Biscay list and Nekane Erauskin the Gipuzkoa list. Some tables name Aranburu as the candidacy's principal figure.

The electoral board of the Basque Country published the general scrutiny on 13 May 2005 and corrected the Álava return on 23 May. The corrected EHAK figures were 14,187 votes and two seats in Álava, 65,623 and two in Biscay, and 70,834 and five in Gipuzkoa: 150,644 votes, 12.35 percent of 1,219,599 valid votes. The uncorrected bulletin had counted one extra Álava vote, 150,645, which is why both totals circulated. Turnout was 68 percent. The Basque Nationalist Party–Eusko Alkartasuna coalition, whose candidate was Juan José Ibarretxe, won 468,117 votes (38.38 percent) and 29 seats; the Socialist Party of the Basque Country–Basque Country Left, led by Patxi López, 274,546 (22.51 percent) and 18; the People's Party 210,614 (17.27 percent) and 15; Ezker Batua–Berdeak, linked to United Left, 65,023 (5.33 percent) and three; and Aralar 28,180 (2.31 percent) and one seat, in Gipuzkoa. In May 2001 Euskal Herritarrok, headed by Otegi, had won 143,139 votes (10.04 percent) and seven seats on a 78.97 percent turnout, so EHAK added votes and two seats while taking a larger share of a smaller poll.

The nine deputies sat as Ezker Abertzalea, with Erauskin as spokesperson, beside separate nationalist and EA groups, the Socialists, the People's Party and a Mixed Group of Ezker Batua and Aralar. On 22 April Erauskin and Aranburu said the list was taking up Batasuna's Anoeta proposal of November 2004: exclusively political and democratic means, a referendum "in peaceful conditions", and no condemnation of ETA, plus restoration of civil and political rights and what they treated as self-determination.

On 22 June, with 38 votes required, Ibarretxe had 34 (29 from PNV–EA, three from Ezker Batua and two from EHAK) and López 33. Seven EHAK deputies voted null and Aralar's deputy blank. The same figures on 23 June, when a simple majority was enough, returned Ibarretxe at the head of a PNV–EA–Ezker Batua coalition. Erauskin called the two votes "an exercise of responsibility" and not support for the candidate or his government, but a way "to open a new opportunity to join forces in favour of democracy and peace". The group called the election "antidemocratic". Ibarretxe had offered talks open to parties without seats, including Batasuna, and a consultation "in the absence of violence", in the line of the Ibarretxe Plan. In September 2008 the Supreme Court declared EHAK illegal and dissolved it.

Organization, leadership and financing

Leadership and structure

The statutes filed with the Register of Political Parties at the Ministry of the Interior gave the registered office as Calle Ibáñez de Bilbao 8, 3º, in Bilbao. The deed of constitution of 29 July 2002 included Juan Carlos Ramos Sánchez, who identified the party with the earlier Euskal Herriko Komunistak current, and Javier Ramos Sánchez, described in a Civil Guard account reported by El País as a founder and treasurer. The same account said Jokin Elarre, who signed an EHK pamphlet with Javier Ramos, was a repeat Batasuna candidate rather than an officer of the registered party.

Its deputies sat in the Basque Parliament as Ezker Abertzalea. The state prosecutor’s 2008 dissolution demand named Nekane Erauskin Otegui, born in Arama, Gipuzkoa, in 1962, as spokesperson. In a July 2009 processing order, Judge Baltasar Garzón of the Audiencia Nacional called Juan Carlos Ramos president, Karmele Berasategui treasurer of the parliamentary group, and Sonia Jacinto and Jesús María Aguirre the party treasurers. Aguirre Arruabarrena also testified as treasurer before the Supreme Court of Spain.

Bank papers cited by the prosecutor gave a further address, Calle Guruztegi 12, office 14, in the Belartza estate at Usurbil, posted as 20018 Donostia–San Sebastián. On 5 October 2007 police searched it, in a building where a Batasuna office had been closed in January 2006. The Supreme Court found that the party had rented the premises and that members of Batasuna’s Mesa Nacional met there in November 2007 and on 7 January 2008; the party denied that and said the unit was not then rented. The prosecutor listed the chamber in Vitoria-Gasteiz only as an address for service.

Subsidies, staff and transfers

For 2005, the Court of Auditors recorded 1,235,691.69 euros in public subsidies in the accounts filed: 479,381.40 euros electoral, 458,708.56 euros from the Basque Government for ordinary costs, and 297,601.73 euros for the parliamentary group. The Parliament reported 299,006.65 euros; the Court attributed the gap to withholdings and noted that the Government grants lay outside the public resources listed in the party-finance law then in force. Private income was 107,781.79 euros, almost all from members and sympathizers. The accounts omitted municipal premises.

Published counts of Batasuna-linked staff differed. In May 2007 El Mundo, citing Social Security records, reported about thirty such figures on the group’s payroll, at least eight on the then Mesa Nacional. The prosecutor’s demand, using Civil Guard material, said hiring began in July 2006 and that 16 people on the PCTV payroll belonged or had belonged to Batasuna’s national leadership, with seven more from provincial boards and two from the national assembly. A January 2008 police report summarized by Público counted 39 Batasuna officials contracted by PCTV, 12 of them on the Mesa Nacional, plus cash or cheques to another 14, nine on that board.

The Supreme Court judgment of 22 September 2008, rapporteur Enrique Bacigalupo, did not adopt one headcount. It listed thirty people it treated as significant hires — including treasurer Jesús María Aguirre Arruabarrena, a Herri Batasuna candidate in 1991, and Sonia Jacinto García — and added Juan José Petrikorena, recorded by Caja Laboral as receiving monthly sums booked as “Nómina EHAK”. The party called the contracts ordinary hiring and salary advances.

That police report described movements of 1,126,000 euros: seven transfers totaling 189,000 euros, twenty totaling 208,000 euros to leaders abroad, mainly in France and Belgium, and 27 further transfers of 27,000 euros each. The Supreme Court examined transfers of 27,000 euros and of 24,000 euros, the latter in two payments of 12,000, including one to Mesa Nacional member Joseba Zinkunegi. Aguirre told the court that wages were a little over 1,000 euros a month, or 1,500 to 1,600; the court noted that a year at 1,600 euros would be 19,200 euros and that the transferred sums matched across recipients. It treated them as pay inside a legal party, not as proof the money had entered Batasuna’s assets, and held that a treasury note of 13 June 2007 from Usurbil did not clearly prove a shared cash box with Batasuna and Acción Nacionalista Vasca.

Garzón’s July 2009 order used another figure. He wrote that Batasuna’s leaders had, chiefly through PCTV, obtained 837,000 euros for the political structure he linked to ETA, and that an account in Erauskin’s name had been used to transfer 27,000 euros to Batasuna. He attributed to Ramos knowledge of the hiring, the emptying of accounts and a common management with Batasuna and ANV, and tied Berasategui, Jacinto and Aguirre to the movements through their treasury posts.

Relations with the abertzale left

Coordination with Batasuna and ANV

On 8 April 2005 Arnaldo Otegi said banned Batasuna would drop its lists and ask its base to campaign for EHAK, calling it the only legal ballot "in absolute tune" not with Batasuna's ideology but with its proposal for the political and armed conflict. A Guardia Civil report, which state lawyers still judged too thin for a challenge, said that after a 30 March meeting with Batasuna figures including Joseba Permach, EHAK dropped a "purely Marxist" message for Batasuna's demands — self-determination, a national forum, a party table and "democracy and peace" — and that Batasuna had absorbed it "de facto". Notes of 24 March had found no contacts sufficient to bar the lists.

On election night Otegi called the nine seats "the magnificent result that we have obtained" and said the vote had upheld Batasuna's Anoeta proposal. He joined EHAK's celebration in Bilbao, where Maite Aranburu said the banned sector of the abertzale left would now be heard in the Basque Parliament.

EHAK did not stand in the May 2007 municipal and foral elections. In December 2006 Julián Martínez said a candidacy was not planned and that standing would mean "things are going very badly". Batasuna's call went to Acción Nacionalista Vasca: on 13 May Pernando Barrena asked voters in the Basque Country and Navarre to choose ANV. On 6 May the Supreme Court had unanimously annulled 246 Abertzale Sozialistak lists and the 133 ANV lists under challenge. EHAK said it would join an ANV march in Bilbao and that the elections "are not going to be democratic". Where it ran, ANV took about 73,000 votes in the Basque autonomous community, won 31 of 97 municipalities, and returned 337 councillors.

El Mundo reported that police had documented EHAK wage payments of more than 1,000 euros to about ten Batasuna leaders, from a 14 September executive meeting in Salvatierra which deputy Nekane Erauskin was said to have attended. On 4 October, under an Audiencia Nacional order, police arrested 23 people, including Joseba Permach and others linked to ANV, at a Segura meeting described as a handover inside Batasuna. Next day they searched EHAK's office at Gurutzegi 12 in San Sebastián, on the same floor as a Batasuna premises closed in January 2006; Erauskin was turned away at the door. A January 2008 police account reported by El País described the "subordination" of ANV and EHAK to Batasuna, a shared treasury, and EHAK payments to as many as 49 Batasuna members. Judge Baltasar Garzón wrote of those officials as "desdoblado" militants, holding a second post as EHAK employees or ANV advisers.

Conduct in the Basque Parliament

On 26 May 2005 EHAK registered the deputies as Ezker Abertzalea, the Basque name of the abertzale left, with Erauskin as spokesperson, and said their work would stay inside the chamber.

On 3 January 2007, after the bombing at Madrid-Barajas airport, the group said the "process" could not be treated as broken and that dialogue was "more important than ever" for the roots of the political conflict, and it offered solidarity to the families of two people still missing. On 19 January every group except the PP and EHAK condemned ETA's attack and demanded a "definitive end to the violence". EHAK stayed out of the debate so as not to "enter the PP's game and the row". On 6 June, after ETA ended its ceasefire, Erauskin and Martínez said the only alternative was "dialogue and negotiation" with "all parties to this political conflict", and that "hard times" were ahead.

On 9 February 2007 the chamber, with the governing tripartite, the Socialists and the PP, condemned "plans designed by ETA" to sabotage the high-speed Basque Y. EHAK opposed four of the five points and did not vote the point condemning ETA's threats; Martínez called the text an excuse to "criminalize and delegitimize the popular movement" against the line. On 14 March 2008, after ETA killed the former Socialist councillor Isaías Carrasco in Mondragón the previous Friday, the parliament approved a declaration, backed by every group but EHAK, rejecting the "criminal attack" and demanding ETA's "immediate dissolution". President Izaskun Bilbao said EHAK had not signed it but had not blocked its reading.

Criminal investigation and suspension

The Audiencia Nacional inquiry

On 21 January 2008 the National Police Corps and the Civil Guard gave Judge Baltasar Garzón, of the Audiencia Nacional, reports of 285 and 125 folios on links between the Communist Party of the Basque Homelands (EHAK/PCTV), Acción Nacionalista Vasca (ANV) and the banned party Batasuna. The material came largely from the 4 October 2007 arrests of most of Batasuna's national committee in Segura and from papers taken at EHAK's office in San Sebastián. The reports concluded that Batasuna exercised economic and political tutelage over both legal parties through a shared treasury directed by the Batasuna leader Joseba Permach. At the San Sebastián office police found payroll records for 39 Batasuna officials, 14 of them on its national committee, and transfers of 1,126,000 euros from EHAK accounts, including 729,000 euros moved from the parliamentary group. Garzón lifted secrecy and set hearings for 4 February on EHAK and 5 February on ANV.

On 6 February, after the prosecution had asked that EHAK's activity be suspended, Garzón charged the president, Juan Carlos Ramos, and the treasurers Jesús María Aguirre and Sonia Jacinto with collaboration with an armed organization, referring to ETA, and with illicit association. The order described an alleged financial use of the legal party, through operations its officers had authorized, designed, directed or joined, in support of Batasuna and ETA. Ramos and Aguirre had already been charged in September 2005 by Judge Fernando Grande-Marlaska with collaboration alone. Because the spokesperson Nekane Erauskin and the deputy Karmele Berasategi had parliamentary immunity, Garzón asked the prosecutor whether a request to lift it should go to the High Court of Justice of the Basque Country, and he ordered banks to report any movement on party and group accounts.

On 17 July 2009 Garzón committed the five for trial for integration in ETA. The order held that from 2005 EHAK had been one of the "brands" Batasuna used "according to the interest of the terrorist complex led by ETA," and that Batasuna had obtained 837,000 euros chiefly through EHAK. Aguirre and Jacinto were already on provisional release on bail of 50,000 euros each, set after their arrest in February 2008; on 1 September 2009 Garzón ordered the same status for Erauskin and Berasategi on bail of 60,000 euros each and refused the pre-trial detention sought by the prosecution and Dignidad y Justicia. On 13 January 2016, 35 defendants from Batasuna, EHAK and ANV, including Ramos, Aguirre, Erauskin and Berasategi, accepted 18 months to two years for membership of a terrorist organization, admitting they had been "instrumentalized" by ETA; the judgment fixed 18 months and disqualification from public office for those four.

The February 2008 suspension

On 8 February 2008 Garzón suspended EHAK and ANV for three years, extendable to five. He held that fourteen members of the two parties already charged had incurred collaboration with a terrorist organization, illicit association, and subsidy fraud or misappropriation of public funds, and that the parties had for three years been "a political instrument in the hands of Batasuna leaders and an economic means of sustaining those leaders and of fulfilling the terrorist ends of Batasuna-ETA." The rulings placed them on the threshold of integration into the terrorist organization and dated a stable purpose of collaboration from 13 June 2007, when ETA ended its truce. Garzón wrote that the order was not an illegalization — separate illegalization proceedings were that day before the Supreme Court of Spain — but a precautionary bar, reversible if that use ceased. He joined the EHAK, ANV and Batasuna committee files into one case of 52 accused, 38 for integration and 14 for collaboration.

Premises were closed and utilities cut; accounts were blocked and new ones forbidden; and subsidies in money or in kind from central, regional and local administrations were stopped. For three years neither party could stand in elections, campaign or act as a party, which kept ANV out of the general election of 9 March 2008; EHAK had filed no lists. The order did not vacate offices: mayors, councillors and EHAK's nine deputies in the Basque Parliament kept their seats as individuals, and the nine could sit as a group inside the chamber but not act as that group outside it. Garzón said he would ask the Basque high court to consider suspending the group and lifting the immunity of Erauskin and Berasategi, whom the ruling provisionally associated with transfers of up to 768,000 euros to Batasuna and its leaders.

After that day's Council of Ministers, First Deputy Prime Minister María Teresa Fernández de la Vega said the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero respected and shared the decision and that neither party would receive any public subsidy. Batasuna leaders Karmelo Landa and Mikel Etxaburu called for street and electoral mobilization and blamed the Socialist government.

Dissolution by the Supreme Court

Proceedings under the Political Parties Law

On 29 January 2008 the Public Prosecution Service filed a civil action in the Special Chamber of Article 61 of the Organic Law of the Judiciary, the formation of the Supreme Court of Spain that applies the organic law on political parties (Ley Orgánica 6/2002). Under Article 10.2(c) it asked the court to declare the Communist Party of the Basque Homelands (Euskal Herrialdeetako Alderdi Komunista, EHAK; Partido Comunista de las Tierras Vascas, PCTV) illegal and dissolved, to cancel its registration, to end its activity at once and to liquidate its assets. On 30 January the State Attorney, for the national government, filed a parallel action, and the cases were joined as autos 3/2008 and 4/2008.

EHAK answered on 1 April 2008 and asked that both claims be dismissed. As the judgment later records the defence, the party denied that it had come from Euskal Herriko Komunistak or from an internal current of Batasuna, denied any subordination to that party, and denied lending it premises in Usurbil or financing its members through employment contracts. It said the group elected to the Basque Parliament in 2005 had not been instrumentalized, treated the police reports as accusations rather than proof, and argued that Article 9 did not apply because its work was speech and ordinary parliamentary activity, not grave or repeated support for terrorism. It also invoked the inviolability of Basque deputies and the foreseeability required by the European Convention on Human Rights.

The September 2008 judgment

The chamber was presided over by Francisco José Hernando Santiago, with Enrique Bacigalupo Zapater as rapporteur. On 18 September 2008 its sixteen members announced a unanimous decision to illegalize and dissolve EHAK, two days after the same chamber had announced the dissolution of Acción Nacionalista Vasca. The written judgment is dated 22 September 2008 (ECLI:ES:TS:2008:4585).

The court upheld both claims. It held that, through its support for Batasuna, EHAK had become the “equivalente funcional” of a party already declared illegal as the expression of a terrorist strategy of ETA from which EHAK had not distanced itself. Reading Article 9 together with its judgment of 27 March 2003, which dissolved Herri Batasuna, Batasuna and Euskal Herritarrok, the chamber said a ban does not require the party to be directed by an illegal party or a terrorist group, to be their “instrument”, or to have concluded an express formal pact. The statute, it wrote, requires “the objective meaning of a contribution to terrorism”, including indirect support given through an organization that itself acts systematically with a terrorist group.

It found institutional, financial and logistical support: premises in Usurbil of which Batasuna leaders could dispose, and where Batasuna invoices were found; the incorporation of Batasuna members into the party’s work, some paid as employees while remaining in Batasuna’s leadership; and transfers described as wage advances that could not be reconciled with the salaries its treasurer described. It also found a discourse that did not expressly condemn the murder of Isaías Carrasco or attacks on firms working on the Basque high-speed line. Those facts, it held, were a grave and continuing complement to terrorist activity under Articles 9.2(c) and 9.3(c), (e) and (f). Only a direct resort to violence was not required, the chamber said, citing the Constitutional Court of Spain’s ruling on the 2002 law (STC 48/2003). An unsigned document of 13 June 2007 was not treated as proof of a common fund with ANV and Batasuna; the court said that point would not change the result.

The operative part declared the party illegal, dissolved it with the effects of Article 12.1, cancelled its registration, required it to cease all activity once notified, and opened liquidation in execution of the sentence, with no order as to costs. The judgment states that it is final and enforceable, with no ordinary appeal, without prejudice to a constitutional amparo.

Seats, liquidation and the constitutional appeal

Article 12.1 provides that a dissolved party must stop all activity once the judgment is notified, and that three liquidators named by the sentencing court wind up the estate, the net assets being assigned by the Treasury to activities of social or humanitarian interest. On 12 December 2008 the State Attorney told the chamber that only part of the judgment had been executed: the inscription at the Ministry of the Interior had been cancelled on 23 September, but liquidation had not begun and the parliamentary group had not been dissolved. The filing asked the court to appoint the liquidators and to direct the Basque Parliament to dissolve the nine-member group Ezker Abertzalea and stop payments to it.

Reports of the ruling said the nine deputies elected in 2005 would keep their personal mandates but lose the group: El País wrote that they would have to enter the Mixed Group, while RTVE reported that they could join it or form another group under a different name. The group still existed in December, and the judgment had not been notified to the Basque Parliament, which was not a party. A decree of the lehendakari, published on 6 January 2009, dissolved the parliament and called an election for 1 March. By an order of 16 July 2009 the Special Chamber declared the request to dissolve Ezker Abertzalea without object, because the group had ended with the chamber, which the court dated to 9 January.

EHAK filed an amparo; sources at the Constitutional Court confirmed it on 28 October 2008. ANV filed on 3 November. In early December the Constitutional Court admitted ANV’s amparo — El País later dated that admission to 2 December — and rejected EHAK’s. On 29 January 2009 the same court dismissed ANV’s amparo and upheld that dissolution, noting that PCTV’s appeal had already been rejected.

Aftermath and the debate over party bans

The abertzale left after EHAK

The dissolution did not return EHAK-PCTV to legal politics. On 3 December 2008 the Constitutional Court of Spain dismissed the party's amparo against the judgment of the Supreme Court of Spain, while admitting a parallel appeal by Acción Nacionalista Vasca (ANV). The Special Chamber had announced ANV's dissolution on 16 September 2008 and EHAK-PCTV's on 18 September. The reasoned judgments, both dated 22 September 2008, declared each party illegal for grave and repeated collaboration with the already banned Batasuna and, through it, political support for ETA. The Constitutional Court dismissed ANV's amparo unanimously on 29 January 2009. EHAK-PCTV was not restored to the register.

For the Basque Parliament election of 1 March 2009, the abertzale left tried to stand as Democracia 3 Millones (D3M) and as Askatasuna. On the night of 8 February 2009 the Supreme Court unanimously annulled both lists as instruments of the ETA–Batasuna network. The 1 March poll was the first Basque autonomous election since the transition with no radical abertzale candidacy. The official scrutiny recorded 100,939 null votes — 9,060 in Álava, 43,971 in Bizkaia and 47,908 in Gipuzkoa — 8.79 percent of the 1,148,697 ballots cast in the three historic territories, and 11,562 blank ballots. The abertzale left claimed the null votes as its own; there had been 4,035 null ballots at the previous regional election, and the 2009 null votes elected nobody. Aralar, an abertzale party that rejected violence, won 62,514 votes and four seats.

The leading Strasbourg case concerned the 2003 bans, not EHAK. In Herri Batasuna and Batasuna v. Spain (30 June 2009, applications 25803/04 and 25817/04), the European Court of Human Rights held unanimously that dissolving Herri Batasuna and Batasuna did not violate Article 11 — the measure was necessary for public safety, prevention of disorder and the rights of others — and that Article 10 need not be examined separately. ANV's dissolution case, Eusko Abertzale Ekintza–Acción Nacionalista Vasca v. Spain (No. 2) (application 40959/09), was decided on 15 January 2013: no violation of Article 11, Article 10 left unexamined, the ban prescribed by the Parties Law and proportionate to support for Batasuna and ETA.

In early 2011 promoters sought to register a new party, Sortu, whose statutes rejected violence. An order of 30 March 2011 refused inscription on the ground that Sortu would continue Batasuna.

Bildu — Eusko Alkartasuna, Alternatiba and independent abertzale candidates — was formed for the 22 May 2011 local and foral elections, and the Supreme Court annulled its lists. On 5 May 2011, STC 62/2011 upheld Bildu's amparo by six votes to five, finding a breach of Article 23 and stating that any project is compatible with the Constitution if it is not pursued by activity that violates democratic principles or fundamental rights. Bildu then stood in more than 250 municipalities in the Basque Country and Navarre. On 20 June 2012, STC 138/2012 annulled the refusal to register Sortu and ordered its inscription, citing the absence of solid, qualified proof of succession and the weight of statutes that rejected terrorist violence. EHAK-PCTV did not reappear. Sortu later joined other pro-independence left parties in EH Bildu.

Arguments about dissolution

Governments and the dissolving courts described the bans as protection of democratic competition from ETA's political arm, not as a prohibition of independence as an idea. On 12 March 2003 the Constitutional Court upheld Organic Law 6/2002 after a challenge by the Basque government. In STC 48/2003 it separated the statute from militant democracy: the law reached repeated conduct, including support for terrorism, not programmes or aims. The Supreme Court applied that test to EHAK-PCTV as Batasuna's "functional equivalent," and to ANV for grave collaboration with Batasuna and support for ETA. Strasbourg accepted the framing in 2009 and, for ANV, in 2013. In 2011 Solicitor General Joaquín de Fuentes Bardají called Bildu's candidates those of the "succession of Batasuna-ETA," and People's Party leader Mariano Rajoy called the ruling a backward step against ETA.

Critics invoked freedom of association, the breadth of the conduct test, and the voters left without a representative. Commentary records the objection, associated with José Antonio Montilla, that the 2002 law installed a militant democracy at odds with the Constitution; the Spanish model has also been called an attenuated form of that doctrine. EHAK-PCTV and ANV pleaded association and expression in amparo, and ANV repeated the claim in Strasbourg. After the 2009 exclusion, spokesperson Itziar Lopategi called the campaign a "repressive witch hunt" aimed at keeping the abertzale left off the ballot, and treated the null votes as its participation despite electing nobody. Basque Nationalist Party leader Iñigo Urkullu called Bildu's admission good news for Basque society, not only for the coalition. The majorities in STC 62/2011 and STC 138/2012 demanded qualified proof of fraud rather than preventive suspicion. In dissent, Magistrate Javier Delgado Barrio wrote that the Supreme Court had not violated the right to found a party and that a reasonable reading of the evidence should not have been replaced.