Denouncement of international organisms.
Consequences of manhandle.

It is necessary to point out that in order to open a legal extradiction process, the Spanish political and policial authorities must send to the relative French authorities the inculpatory evidences found against the prisoners. In almost one hundred percent, the inculpatory evidences forwarded to the French authorities are obtained after long illegal interrogatories (in the Spanish state, a detained person can be held incomunicado, without any juridical presence or assistance to certify the physical or psychological state of the detained, for a period of five days) where manhandling and torture is always present.

These tortures are more or less brutal depending on the results that the Spanish police is seeking, and these results are selfinculpations or denouncement of other Basque citizens.

The continuation of these tortures is the delivery of the detained to the Spanish Audiencia Nacional, who will decide about the imprisonment and further trial of the detained. However, we must say that the competence of the Audiencia Nacional to initiate proceedings against the political Basque prisoners, is one of the main reasons of the existence of tortures.

We must never forget that the mere existence of this Court contradicts article 24, paragraph 4, of the Spanish Constitution, which recognises the right of every citizen to be judged by the ordinary judge as determined by the laws, to a public process without any undue delays with all legal guarantees, and the presumption of innocence. Also, Principle 5, of the Basic Principles regarding the independence of the tribunals states that all persons will have the right to be judged by ordinary tribunals and in accordance with the proceedings legally set, which means that the natutal judge of the place where the offense has been committed is competent to initiate and judge the proceedings.

If we look at the real and factual situation, it is to be pointed out that the judges who are part of this Court, repeatedly take no notice of any denouncement of tortures and manhandling, even in cases of clear evidence of the consequences of the same, and they admit the expression "he or she has the right physical and psychical conditions to appear before Court", introduced by the phorensic doctors of the Audiencia Nacional in their reports to the judge before the proceedings are initiated. But nobody has made an investigation of what has happened ate the hands of the police during the period of incommunication, even if the following declaration of the detained evidences that his or her state of the consequence of the tortures suffered in five days.

It is very significant that all requests of "habeas corpus" (measures requested not later than 24 hours after a person is detained, when these detentions have been made under violence or when there is fear that the detained person is being manhandled), made by the counsel for the defense are systematically refused by the judges, whicheve be the circunstances.

The judges are not interested in learning whether the declarations have been made under torture or not. In several occasions, and before the evidence that, as a consequence of the incommunication, the detained were not able to declare, due to their physical or psychical state, the judges decide to decree the provisional prison until the tortured is able to declare.

And also, these judges accept as valid the declarations and selfinculpatory obtained under torture, against the provisions of article 15 of the Spanish Constitution regarding torture, manhandling and other sentences, cruel, unhuman or degradatory, which states that no declaration evidenced as having been obtained by means of tortures, manhandling and other cruel, unhuman or degradatory means, will be accepetd as an evidence against the accused or any other person in any kind of proceeding.

Even if, in many cases, it is very difficult to prove torture or manhandling, a sentence made public the 22nd of January 1998, the 2nd Section of the Provincial Court of Donostia, signed by the Judges Luis Blanquez, Luis Maria Tovar and Coro Cillan, recognised that "Everybody is aware that insults, threats, even of death, can either be invented to damage the prestige of the police or be true and impossible to be evidenced", due to the technical improvement attained by the interrogators and that, in many cases, tortures are psychological, and practised on a person held incommunicado. Even in cases of evident signs that the detained has been tortured, the judge accept his or her declarations and all other elements presented by the police when taking declaration, which results in prison.

Another system, lately very widely used by the judges of the Audiencia Nacional, is that the arrested person has to give declaration with being present his or her approved lawyer, which reduces even more the minimal rights of the detained, making him totally defenceless.

As a conclusion, we are in a situation to affirm that the policy of prohibiting to fix residence to the Basque citizens, after they have served their sentences in the French state, is based on two measures: Administrative turning over and deportation, illegal the first (in accordance with the decissions of many admninistrative French Courts), and accompanied by tortures and manhandling at the hands of the Spanish police, and judicial procedures and contaminated proceedings the second, ellaborated from inculpatory declarations after many long hours of torture. Both procedures have been systematically denounced by international organisms, working in favour of Human Rights (Amnesty International, European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, International Prison Observers, among others).