Amnesty proposal of Sumar includes vote organization and protests, leaves out many violent police actions

The amnesty proposal from the Spanish left-wing coalition Sumar includes offering amnesty to those who carried out actions to achieve independence for Catalonia since 2013, taking in the October 2019 protests against the sentencing of the referendum leaders.

Police officers who committed crimes of injury would also be included in the proposal. However, the proposition excludes those cases where the police action "was susceptible to being qualified as torture and against moral integrity," and actions of police officers who tried to violently suppress the 2017 vote.

The proposal was written by criminal law professors and presented on Tuesday by one of them, Nicolás García, along with Sumar member and former Congress MP Jaume Asens in Barcelona. It has been sent to pro-independence parties Esquerra and Junts.

Sumar's text does not consider illegal detentions to be part of the application of a possible amnesty law.

For the anti-austerity party Sumar, the amnesty law is not "an exchange" for Pedro Sánchez's investiture, but rather a "natural and needed step forward to have a historic agreement," as Asens explained in the proposal's presentation.

Amnesty has to be "a tool for the conflict to be back in parliaments, and not in courts or prisons," Asens added. 

Sumar are likely to be the junior partner in a left-wing coalition if Sánchez is reelected. 

Sánchez needs the votes of Catalan pro-independence parties Esquerra and Junts, but in return they have demanded an amnesty for actions related to the independece push.

Such an amnesty could pave the way for the return of former president Carles Puigdmeont and other exiled politicians.