It undermines the role of the Prosecutor’s Office and recommends reopening the investigation commission in the Assembly and a change in the care model
The Citizen Commission for the Truth in the residences of the Community of Madrid during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, promoted by the Marea de Residencias and Verdad y Justicia platforms, has concluded that the response of the regional government “was inadequate” and “fundamental rights” of residents and their families were “violated.”
According to the report on what happened in the residences in the months of March and April 2020, in this period there was “an excess mortality” in these centers “that could and should have been avoided.”
Among the dozen conclusions of the report, presented this Friday at the Ateneo de Madrid, it also includes that “social and health resources were insufficient” when the pandemic was declared, a situation that “has not been corrected.”
In this report, presented after three months of studies and 25 testimonies collected, it is noted that the communication between residences and relatives, as well as the information to them, “was inadequate” and it is ruled that the Community “did not medicalize the residences.”
“The Community of Madrid drastically restricted the referrals of patients from residences to hospitals, using discriminatory criteria based on place of residence, physical disability or cognitive impairment, as well as lack of private insurance,” underlines the report, which highlights that the Administration regional “did not use existing alternative means” to offer health care to nursing home patients “nor did it refer patients to private hospitals.”
For this Commission, “the suffering and avoidable death of thousands of elderly people who lived in nursing homes” was a consequence of “planned and conscious decisions of discrimination in care”, which is why it rules that “fundamental rights have been seriously violated.” of residents and their families”.
SUPPORTS THAT “THE RIGHT TO THE TRUTH HAS BEEN VIOLATED”
The report maintains that “the right to the truth” has also been violated, as it considers that “what happened has not been properly investigated” and “neither responsibilities nor fair reparations have been established.”
The person in charge of presenting the report has been the president of the Commission, the emeritus magistrate of the Supreme Court José Antonio Martín Pallín, who has specified that “this is not an invasion of tasks that correspond to politicians”, but given that the commissions investigation “were frustrated”, actions like this “strengthen democratic quality.
He has been especially critical of the role of the Prosecutor’s Office when it comes to investigating what happened or participating in ongoing judicial processes, an attitude that he has labeled as “conformist” and that due to his professional past in the Prosecutor’s Office “hurts him doubly.” “. “In some cases they did not even attend the statements,” he lamented.
Among the recommendations that the report indicates is precisely the search “for the truth” and the “duty not to forget”, something that happens, they point out, because both the Government of the Community and the Madrid Assembly “reopen the commission of inquiry into the pandemic.” Added to this is that the Prosecutor’s Office “completes an effective and diligent investigation.”
In addition, it calls for a “radical change” in the approach to the care model, something that would entail an economic, sociocultural dimension – which involves greater visibility of the elderly or people with disabilities “as subjects with full rights”, health, legal –with an “updating of regulations”– and politics. Finally, it is requested to “improve the provision of the public health system” and “make visible and fight against ageism.”
“NOT ALL THE CCAA ACT IN THE SAME WAY”
During the presentation of this report, the emeritus magistrate has recognized the “exceptional situation” that was experienced and that made the political leaders “compelled to make decisions that otherwise they would have made with more time”, but he has insisted that Politics is “the art of deciding” and he highlighted that the report shows that “not all autonomous communities acted in the same way.”
The president of the Citizen Commission for the Truth has stressed that the report presented this Friday “is not a dogma of faith”, but a result “the result of rigorous, reasoned and founded work”, which is why he has defended that at the time To dismantle it, “rigorous, reasoned and well-founded work will also have to be done.” “The debate is open”, he launched.
Once presented, in an event that was attended by the spokespersons of the Más Madrid and PSOE political groups in both the Madrid Assembly and the capital’s City Hall, the text will be sent to “all State institutions.” , such as the aforementioned Prosecutor’s Office, the Ombudsman and even the Crown, as well as the European Commission.
In the opinion of José Antonio Martín Pallín, the criminal proceedings for what happened in the residences “should be headed by the Public Prosecutor’s Office” as “repository of public action”, although he recalled that also families and even citizens through the figure of the accusation popular, they can go to court.
A “DESOATING” STATISTICS IN THE COURTS SO FAR
All this after recognizing that “so far” the panorama in the courts shows a “rather bleak statistic”, with 19 cases filed so far by the Madrid jurisdictional bodies.
Martín Pallín has appeared accompanied by the rest of the members of the Commission, such as the professor of Constitutional Law and the Institute of Human Rights of the University of Valencia Fernando Flores, at the time editor of the report; the doctor in epidemiology María Victoria Zunzunegui; the doctor Fernando Lamata; the writer Anna Freixas; the sociologist and political scientist Cristina Monge, and the lawyer and professor at the Carlos III University of Madrid Eduardo Ranz.
Specifically, María Victoria Zunzunegui has highlighted that the decisions adopted ignored professional practices and scientific evidence of what happened in China or Italy weeks before. “What had to be done was not done in accordance with professional practices and scientific evidence,” she stressed.
For his part, Dr. Lamata has asserted that the elderly referred to hospital centers had “a survival rate of 65%”, which extrapolated to the Community of Madrid could translate into “more than 4,000” of the 7,291 deaths in nursing homes of the region “could have been saved. “It didn’t matter,” he concluded.
To date, Justice has added 19 pronouncements that dismiss the responsibilities of the Community of Madrid in what happened, the last one, for the death of two residents in two residences in Parla, in which the Provincial Court deduced that the attention deployed “was the right one.”
Unlike in this case, the Provincial Court of Madrid did force the Court of First Instance and Instruction number 3 of Collado Villalba to reopen a case last year against the president of the Community, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and her former Ministers of Health and Interior, Enrique López and Enrique Ruiz Escudero, respectively, for the deaths of users of a nursing home in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Also previously, the Provincial Court had determined, in relation to the death of two other residents in another residence in the Community, that the regional government prioritized clinical criteria in referrals.
