The man spent up to 3 years in pre-trial detention, while his partner spent just under a year. In 2019, the Supreme Court acquitted them after repeating the case.
For almost 4 years, the Centre for the Care of Victims of Abuse and Torture, Sira, has carried out the therapeutic accompaniment of an innocent married couple imprisoned for jihadism for alleged crimes linked to terrorism in 2016. He spent up to 3 years in first-degree pre-trial detention under FIES 3, one of the most severe regimes, in which isolation or solitary confinement is permitted, while she spent just under a year in prison under the same regime.
After their acquittal, both are referred to the Sira Centre due to the level of post-traumatic damage they present and which requires a multidisciplinary and psychotherapeutic approach, which could hardly be provided by a Mental Health Centre. In addition to carrying out their therapeutic accompaniment, the organisation has also been responsible for investigating and documenting their medical and psychological impacts derived from this situation.
The lawyers' cooperative, Legal Network, commissioned the team of Sira the realisation of various expert reports to assess the impact of the project and the impact of the improper pre-trial detention in this family. Eric Sanz, Red Jurídica's lawyer in charge of the case, highlights the exhaustiveness, variety and complexity of the reports, which he considers were fundamental to accrediting the damages suffered by the innocent couple imprisoned for jihadism and, therefore, key to estimating the amount of compensation.
Two expert medical-psychological reports were drawn up by Sira, in which both the history lived by the two examinees and the impacts caused by the experience of deprivation of liberty are recorded. In this regard, they detail very serious psychiatric damage, irreversible impacts on their personality and irreparable effects on their identity and life project.
The impacts of the FIES regime
Pau Pérez Sales, psychiatrist and clinical director of the Sira Centre, points out that isolation causes permanent changes in people, such as attention disorders, irritability or disconnection from their environment. This often results in self-harm and, in some cases, in the creation of their own worlds in which they can take refuge, which can often end up consolidating as psychotic or delusional constructs.
The director of Sira stresses that the human brain needs incentives, no matter where they come from, either from the things it does or from interaction with others: “If we take away any stimulus from a brain, leaving it still in a closed space, it either blocks or tries to compensate by generating its own stimuli, and that is the basis of dissociative or psychotic conditions,” he adds.
The solitary confinement regime in Spain varies greatly depending on the prison. There are prisons that allow people to be in FIES for up to 3 or 4 hours in the courtyard or even to be there accompanied in small groups; while there are more severe prisons that only allow prisoners to spend a maximum of one hour outside solitary confinement. In the case of the expert witness, he spent very long periods in the strictest regime.
The Nelson Mandela standards and the recommendations of the Rapporteur on Torture state incontrovertibly that solitary confinement for more than 15 days is torture. This is often circumvented by detention for 14 days, returning the person to the cell for 2 or 3 days and then returning them to solitary confinement. In other cases, small changes are made to the regime so as not to meet the strict definition of solitary confinement, which is 23-24 hours in a cell.
”The expert process has not only a legal objective, but also a therapeutic one. The aim is for the person to find answers and a meaning to their experience.
The importance of expert work
From Sira understand that the expert process not only has a legal objective, but also a therapeutic one. The aim is for the person to find answers and a meaning to their experience, as well as to be able to recover individual and collective coping strategies that help them to cope with the process. The entity defends the fact that the process of denunciation is in itself a process of dignification for the victims.
Gabriela López, psychologist and coordinator of the Sira Centre, also considers that in the particular case of this couple, mutual support within the family was crucial. Thus, she highlights their sense of justice and their determination to hold the state accountable for its mistake as key elements for the family members to have been able to stand on their own feet during this long process. At the same time, the coordinator considers that this resolution closes the circle of a family struggle and opens a horizon of justice for so many other people who are victims of institutional violence.