Spanish High Court Condemns the Boycott against Israel

• The Higher Court of Justice of Andalusia has rejected the appeal against the sentence that annuls the boycott against Israel.

• The ruling of the Higher Court of Justice of Andalusia completely rejects the appeal presented by the City Hall of Medina Sidonia against the sentence that declared illegal the adherence of said city, with the votes of PSOE and IU, to the BDS campaign (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) against Israel. The Higher Court of Justice of Andalusia also sentences the City Hall to pay the costs of the legal process.

• ACOM sees reaffirmed its legal initiative against the BDS discriminatory movement that intends to use the Spanish public institutions to discriminate against the Jewish people and all who relate with it.

• This is the ninth decision emitted by a Spanish Higher Court of Justice confirming prior sentences against BDS following the legal initiative of ACOM.

On 28 June 2016 the City Hall of Medina Sidonia (population 12,000, in souther of Spain) declared said city as ELAI “Space Free of Israeli Apartheid”. The motion was approved with the votes in favour of PSOE (Socialist Party) and Izquierda Unida (Communist Party), and the vote against of Partido Popular (centre-right party). The Psoe is the ruling party in Spain, and IU, its partner in government.

ACOM presented a contentious-administrative appeal against said measure, which included said city and its population in a clear discriminatory practice by adhering to the BDS-ELAI space. Later, the Contentious Administrative Court number 2 of Cádiz, in sentence number 71/2020, conclusively annulled that measure, indicating that the agreement “was a violation of the competences that the city hall has, becoming involved in international relations, and only for this reason said resolution must be declared null and void”.

But the City Hall of Medina Sidonia, not satisfied with its original discriminatory and fraudulent decision, presented an appeal against that sentence. The response of the Higher Court of Justice of Andalusia, in sentence 1806/21 and dated on 24 November, 2021, could not be more demolishing: complete rejection of the appeal.

Based on numerous examples of recent jurisprudence, in its sentence the Higher Court of Justice of Andalusia meticulously dismantles the aspiration of the City Hall, expressly pointing out that “identifying the City Hall with said position, far from obeying the rule of law, is in open contradiction with the Constitution, and said decision is outside of the municipal competences”.

The Higher Court of Justice of Andalusia also condemns the City Hall to pay for the costs incurred in by this second instance, according to article 139.2 of the Administrative Procedure Act, and given the rejection of the appeal.

It is worth pointing out that the appeal of the City Hall of Medina Sidonia (assisted by the lawyers of the Legal Service of the Provincial Government of Cádiz) also included the so-called Human Rights Association of Andalusia (APDHA), which coordinates the campaign of hatred of BDS-ELAI in Andalusia, hand in hand with leftist organisations, which it uses, as in this case, to introduce discriminatory regulatory spaces that dangerously remember the “Judenfrei” areas of last century. That same association survives thanks to the hundreds of thousands of euros it receives each year from public grants; among them from the Regional Government of Andalusia, the Provincial Governments of Córdoba or Cádiz, or the City Hall of Seville, among others.

Thanks to the legal initiative of ACOM, the main denouncer of the discourse of hatred and/or the discrimination for ethnic or national reasons that this movement promotes, 80 agreements have been annulled to date; nine of them corroborated by Higher Courts of Justice throughout the whole country. All the sentences have insisted in the anti-constitutional and illegal nature of these excluding measures that violate the common framework of coexistence.