Government of Spain is under fire over allegations police officers infiltrated far-left and green groups. And had sex with activists to win their trust and gain information. to win their trust and gain information.
The scandal broke in January. Catalan media La Directa reported that a police officer named Daniel Hernandez had sexual relations with various members of a Barcelona squat and far-left movements since 2020.
According to an alternative publication based in Catalonia’s capital, the intimate relationships in one case lasted nearly a year.
Six women have made a complaint against the officer, accusing him of sexual abuse. They claim their sexual consent was gained through deception.
One of the women’s lawyers, Mireia Salazar, told AFP the goal of the complaint was “to know how far these practices go. Which in our opinion, have no legal justification.”
The scandal deepened after the Madrid branch of climate activist group Extinction Rebellion said last week it had been infiltrated by a female police officer who “had sexual relations with at least one of its members”.
The affair recalls the case in Britain of Kate Wilson, an environmental activist who was tricked into a sexual relationship with an undercover officer for nearly two years.
In a landmark ruling in 2021, a tribunal concluded that the police had violated her human rights.
‘Moral limit?’
In Spain the Hernandez case has sparked outrage. especially in the northeastern region of Catalonia which sparked the country’s worst political crisis in decades in 2017 with a failed independence push.
It comes after Spain central government admitted last year that it spied on the mobile phones of 18 Catalan separatist leaders using Israeli spyware Pegasus.
“Where is your moral limit, where is your ethical limit?” Gabriel Rufian, a top lawmaker with Catalan separatist party ERC, asked Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez last month during a debate in the assembly.
“It is not just a threat to political freedoms, ideological freedoms, but also — it seems — sexual freedoms”, he added in a reference to the case of the undercover Barcelona police officer.
Sanchez’s minority leftist coalition administration depends on the ERC to pass legislation in parliament on a regular basis.
Podemos, Sanchez’s junior coalition partners, has also criticised Sanchez’s Socialists.
“It is violence against women,” Angela Rodriguez, Podemos’ secretary of state for equality, told Catalan radio station Rac1.
“And I believe that the sooner we know what happened and justice is served, the better it will be for security agencies’ reputation,” she added.
