Alex Trelinski
SPAIN’S Supreme Court has backed the stripping of medals awarded to dictator General Francisco Franco by himself as well as his collaborators.
It rejected an appeal launched by the Association for the Reclamation of Historical Memory.
The country’s highest court ratified last July’s decision by the government under the Law of Democratic Memory but rebuked it for making it five days before the general election.
Franco awarded himself the ‘Laureate Gold Medal for Merit and Sacrifice in Work’ in 1953.
Back in 1942, he reintroduced the ‘Merit at Work’ medal which had been awarded by previous dictator Primo de Rivera.
It was handed out to prominent officials, collaborators and ideologues of Franco’s repression.
The Supreme Court said it was evident that Franco ‘participated in the military insurrection of 1936, in the Civil War and in the dictatorial regime that he subsequently established’.
In turning down the Association for the Reclamation of Historical Memory challenge to the medals being removed, the Supreme Court said that the group lacked a ‘legitimate reason’ to appeal and added that its case was ‘doomed to failure” and that ‘none of their arguments would have been able to prosper’.
The court affirmed that Article 42 of the Democratic Memory Law was ‘undoubtedly applicable to the present case’.
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