The government coalition is not in question “at all”, but the words and tone with which the Minister of Justice, the socialist Pilar Llop, is explaining the reform registered yesterday by her party on the law of ‘only yes is yes ‘ Gives the measure of the gap that the star law of Equality has opened in the Executive. Visibly upset, Llop has challenged the head of the department commanded by Irene Montero to clarify why she is advancing the hypothesis that the proposal registered by the PSOE and prepared by Justice to straighten the law in its most harmful aspect – the reduction of sentences for hundreds of sexual offenders- can cause new, more unwanted effects; that is, new sentence attenuations. This was suggested yesterday, enigmatically, by Victoria Rosell, the Government delegate against Gender Violence, career judge and mainstay of Montero’s strategy at the head of Equality. Questioned about it, Rosell did not want to reveal what she was referring to when venturing a “second wave” of sentence reviews; she is understood to be down.
«I think that you have to ask the Minister of Equality (…). With the reform of the PSOE, reviews will not be avoided, but sentence reductions will be”, Llop replied, asked in Ser about the possibility launched by Rosell, during an interview in which the head of Justice, Also a magistrate by profession, she has shown her discomfort not only because of how Equality and United We Can claim a law that has unleashed a schism with unpredictable consequences for the Government; singularly by the very content of the law. Llop has been forced to technically review a law that came out unitarily from a Council of Ministers in which she was not and after the differences in criteria regarding the legal certainty of the norm between its great defenders -Montero and the then vice president- came to light. Pablo Iglesias-, on the one hand, and those also in those days number two of the Government, Carmen Calvo, and the Minister of Justice Juan Carlos Campo, today a magistrate of the TC. In recent days, with the controversy open on the channel, Montero and his party have worked hard to remember that the law came from the Executive as a whole and with the “excellent” legal assistance of the Campo team.
Today, with the consummated disagreement via the PSOE bill in Congress, Llop has become indignant by stressing that with the “only yes is yes” law that is being applied, sexual assault can become “cheaper” than robbery with violence. “It is not acceptable that with this law there has been a reduction in sentences with which in our country it is cheaper to sexually assault a woman with violence than to steal,” the minister criticized, who has insisted that the mitigation of sentences to more than 400 sentenced for abuse and rape it is “very serious” although the rule as a whole represents “a huge advance in our legislation”; »A mirror for other countries«, the minister has also said despite the fact that her department has just modified that Law of Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom.
Llop, who has stressed that “loyalty” must preside over government relations, in what can be interpreted as an implicit reproach to Equality, denies the maxim of United We Can: that the socialist reform touches consent. It does not, the minister has argued, because its definition and development are maintained in article 178, paragraphs one and two, of the Penal Code. And she has justified the refusal to accept the Equality counterproposal of leaving the text as it was but tightening the aggravating regulations with violence and intimidation because that would mean raising the criminal forks to disproportionate levels.