There are already more ETA prisoners in semi-freedom than in the ordinary regime. According to the data managed by Sare, a citizen platform to support the organization’s inmates, of the 118 who remained in prisons in Spain and France at the end of April, 73 of them (62%) are already leaving prison daily, either because they are in the so-called third degree or open regime, or because article 100.2 of the Penitentiary Regime is applied to them, a rule that allows living conditions in prison to be made more flexible. those who are still in second grade with departures from Monday to Friday.
Sources from the organization, which this Saturday held an event in the Guipuzcoan town of Mondragón (22,000 inhabitants), point out that the group hopes that by the end of 2027 practically all ETA prisoners will have been released from prison or enjoy one of the different modalities of semi-freedom contemplated by the prison system. According to their estimates, by then there will be a small group, almost all of them convicted after the reform of the Penal Code that raised the maximum time for serving sentences for terrorism to 40 years, who will not have been able to reach that prison status.
At the event, former Basque Government advisor Joseba Azkarraga, who serves as spokesperson for Sare, recalled that in 2014, the year the platform emerged, there were 465 ETA prisoners, 140 of them in France, compared to just over a hundred today, with only two in French prisons. The platform has highlighted that this quantitative change, but also qualitative change due to the number of semi-freedoms, has increased in recent years for two reasons.
On the one hand, by what they call the “Basque penitentiary model”, launched by the Vitoria executive of the coalition between PNV and PSE after assuming the management of the three Basque prisons in October 2021. The Department of Justice and Human Rights of the Basque Government, now headed by the socialist counselor María Jesús San José, has since granted the third degree to nearly a hundred prisoners and has applied 100.2 to another twenty, although on some occasions the The National Court has revoked these decisions.
The second fact that, according to Sare, has influenced the reduction in the number of ETA prisoners, but also that has made it easier for others to aspire to semi-freedom, is the legal reform approved in October 2024 unanimously in the Congress of Deputies that allows prisoners to deduct from their sentences the time served for the same crime in prisons in other countries. Five ETA prisoners and one from GRAPO have been released since it was approved. Another unquantified group has seen their sentences reduced and, therefore, their release closer. Sare sources point out that there are still a dozen inmates who have asked for it to be applied to them, but the National Court has not agreed to it.
At the Mondragón event, the platform announced its intention that the traditional demonstration in favor of ETA prisoners that is held in January in Bilbao every year will be in 2027 “the culmination of an entire trajectory of social mobilization.” In the statement, read before 600 people, Sare has left the door open to its dissolution: “It is healthy and responsible to also imagine, in the near future, a scenario in which Sare is no longer necessary,” they noted.
