María Jesús Montero, a socialist minister who tramples on one of our human rights

During the Third Reich, the world experienced a totalitarian political regime that sentenced people to death without evidence.

The antidemocratic flight forward of a socialist government implicated in a crime
Socialism and its nostalgia for the Stasi: they use the Treasury as a political police

Convictions without evidence under Nazism and Communism

During Adolf Hitler's dictatorship, it was enough for a person to accuse an enemy of the regime, without any evidence, for that person to face the most brutal and inhuman punishments. This was nothing new in human history. The Soviet communist dictatorship had already implemented a totalitarian penal system very similar to the Nazi one, in which anyone could be convicted of a crime without evidence.

The presumption of innocence in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Following the defeat of the National Socialist dictatorship, the United Nations, at a General Assembly held in Paris, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948, based on the idea that "recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family" is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.

Article 11 of that Declaration addresses the right to the presumption of innocence, that is, that no person shall be convicted without evidence:

Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

In 1978, the Spanish people overwhelmingly approved the Spanish Constitution in force today, which protects the right to the presumption of innocence in its Article 24.2, within a section dedicated to fundamental rights and public freedoms.

A court acquits a footballer due to lack of evidence.

On Friday, a footballer was acquitted by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) of the crime of sexual assault of a young woman in a nightclub in Barcelona on December 31, 2022. The ruling states that "from the evidence presented, it cannot be concluded that the standards required by the presumption of innocence have been exceeded in accordance with Directive (EU) 2016/343 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 1994. Europe of March 9, 2016."

A socialist minister tramples on the right to the presumption of innocence

Yesterday, at a rally of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), a member of Pedro Sánchez's government, the socialist minister María Jesús Montero criticized the sentence with these words collected by the Europa Press agency in this video:

María Jesús Montero ve "una vergüenza" la sentencia que absuelve a Dani Alves y que "todavía se cuestione el testimonio de una víctima y se diga que la presunción de inocencia está por delante del testimonio de mujeres jóvenes": "Estamos contigo" https://t.co/MmtQaBOTdy pic.twitter.com/p6h9vB4OOJ

— Europa Press (@europapress) March 29, 2025

"Dani Alves's sentence is shameful. (...) How shameful that the testimony of a victim is still questioned and that it is said that the presumption of innocence is ahead of the testimony of young, brave women who decide to denounce the powerful, the great, the famous."

It should be remembered that members of the Spanish government must swear or promise to abide by and enforce the Constitution the moment they take office. That Constitution, of course, includes the right to the presumption of innocence, which Montero denies with that statement, based on the aberrant idea that the testimony of a young woman is enough to convict a man without any evidence, an aberrant idea according to which a young woman never lies and her word is enough to put someone in jail for years.

A statement that should lead to the dismissal of that minister

In any democratic country, it should be intolerable for a member of the government to make a statement like that. What Montero has done is a display of anti-democratic thinking, words incompatible with the rule of law and strongly reminiscent of the violations of the right to the presumption of innocence committed by the National Socialist dictatorship and by communist dictatorships.

That statement should have immediate consequences. What Montero did yesterday was trample on a human right protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Spanish Constitution. That statement is a clear violation of his commitment to uphold the Constitution, and therefore should lead to his immediate dismissal. This is intolerable in a democracy.

A socialist government that is outside of democratic principles

It is obvious that this will not happen, because Pedro Sánchez has been supporting such anti-democratic statements for years. Let us remember that in 2018, the then vice president of the government Carmen Calvo already openly trampled on that right, stating that regarding sexual crimes, "women have to be believed no matter what, and always," as if a woman, simply by being a woman, were incapable of lying. Pedro Sánchez is the person primarily responsible for Spain having a government that violates democratic principles with attacks on the presumption of innocence that are increasingly reminiscent of those committed by the communists and national socialists.

---

Photo: PSOE.