Comuns MEP Jaume Asens has filed a criminal complaint with the Hate Crimes and Discrimination Unit of the Public Prosecutor’s Office against the mayor of Badalona (Barcelona), Xavier García Albiol, for four possible offenses linked to the macro-expulsion of the former B9 institute. The complaint, to which EL PAÍS had access, maintains that Albiol could have committed up to four crimes: denial of public service for discriminatory reasons, hate crime, crime of disobedience to judicial authority and crime of administrative prevarication.
For her part, the Minister of Social Rights and Inclusion of the Generalitat, Mònica Martínez Bravo, explained this Wednesday that 120 vulnerable evicted people were relocated in a type of equipment to prevent them from sleeping on the street. In statements to SER Catalunya, Martínez Bravo indicated that the 180 people evicted and identified as vulnerable were offered “an emergency resource” to prevent them from sleeping on the streets. Not everyone accepted.
“How come the country’s fourth-largest city doesn’t have the resources to deal with an emergency like this? he asked. The councilor highlighted the “alliance” of social entities with the Generalitat to “offer a timely resource to these people” and denounced the “inaction” of Badalona City Hall and its mayor. “All administrations must contribute, there cannot be administrations which do not respect their jurisdictional obligations,” he stressed. Martínez Bravo highlighted the “scalpel work” carried out “discreetly” by the entities and social services, to try to rehouse vulnerable evicted people, many of whom took refuge under a bridge on the C-31, where there is a camp with tents.
In his letter to the prosecutor’s office, Asens emphasizes that the judicial resolution which authorized the eviction made it conditional on “guaranteeing an alternative housing for the persons concerned in accordance with the municipal protocol for the homeless”, so that the first was “expressly conditioned” on the second. Despite this, Albiol repeatedly said that the municipality “was not going to provide housing or housing resources” and therefore “persisted in taking action contrary to the court order.” Asens also denounces the “institutional tolerance” of the Badalona City Council with the “episodes of blockade and neighborhood pressure” which have prevented expelled migrants from sleeping in the resources permitted by social entities such as Cáritas and the Red Cross.
“The municipality of Badalona has closed the main municipal emergency accommodation center, the former Can Bofí Vell shelter, leaving the city without a basic public emergency accommodation facility. » According to the document, this measure decisively worsened the lack of institutional response and the lack of protection of those expelled.
Asens denounces that, on December 21, a large group of people “blocked and harassed” access to a parish in the city “in order to prevent several evicted people from benefiting from temporary shelter”. Albiol, in subsequent meetings with neighbors opposed to the relocation, reiterated that he was not going to house these people. The complaint indicates that xenophobic and stigmatizing expressions were heard, which “were not the subject of clear and immediate disapproval” from the mayor. Among them, a neighbor who incited those evicted to “burn” them.
A sentence uttered by Albiol and which the MEP includes in his complaint is: “Give me space, dammit, to try to resolve the problem. Otherwise, do what you think.” According to Asens, this expression can be “reasonably interpreted as implicit tolerance of collective intimidation or the use of force”.
The last point of the presentation of the facts ensures that several media recorded this meeting with the neighbors, which would prove “the existing climate of exaltation, constituting relevant evidence for the assessment of the facts”.
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