The Supreme Court has ratified the ruling of the Provincial Court of Las Palmas that sentenced the satirical website El Agitador to pay 3,000 euros. That ruling, now ratified by the new ruling, understood that the right to honor and image of the plaintiff, the coordinating prosecutor of Lanzarote Miguel Pallarés, had been "violated" by characterizing him as the comedian Chiquito de la Calzada in the cartoon "Demolition Man".
Faced with the Supreme Court's decision, El Agitador, although it abides by it, has once again stated that it considers it "absolutely disproportionate". It also considers that it "calls into question freedom of expression in this country". The website emphasizes that its sole intention was to "denounce a situation of illegality", that of the prosecutor's home, and announces that it will continue to "denounce corruption".
It was the satirical website itself that made this ruling public, explaining that, once again, it refers exclusively to the image of the cartoon, which "it considers had the sole purpose of mocking prosecutor Miguel Pallarés". "The Supreme Court's ruling has not considered the significant context argued by El Agitador's defense, that is, the situation of illegality in which the home that the prosecutor owns in Lanzarote continues to be, as it is on rustic land and with a partial demolition order", explains El Agitador, which emphasizes that the intention of the cartoon was "to denounce this situation, and not the simple mockery of the prosecutor".
A prosecutor with an "illegal home with a demolition order", something "unheard of"
"Faced with the fact, in our opinion unheard of, that a prosecutor owns an illegal home with a demolition order, together with statements made by Miguel Pallarés upon leaving a trial in which he stated that 'it is important that we do not get used to corruption, even if it is small, because in the end we will end up living in a rotten State', El Agitador devised the image of the prosecutor characterized as a comedian, to denote the incoherence of pronouncing that phrase while owning an illegal home that is immersed in one of the great cases of urban corruption in Lanzarote, such as the Bufona case", adds the statement from El Agitador.
In their opinion, the Supreme Court's ruling "represents a new blow to freedom of expression in our country, at a time when complaints and social protest are being silenced by the Government with legal instruments such as the Gag Law". "El Agitador will continue to denounce corruption as it has been doing for the last ten years, with humor and laughter, because the objective continues to be that we can live in a country where democracy is strengthened every day against those who have made corruption and bad government a way of life", he concludes.
