INTERNATIONAL CALL TO CONVERT BARCELONA NATIONAL POLICE
PREFECTURE INTO A SITE OF MEMORY

The Barcelona National Police Prefecture, run by Spain’s Ministry of the Interior, located
in the centre of the city, has a special significance for having been the main scene of
political persecution since its creation in 1929 during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera,
with particular relevance towards those opposed to the Franco regime during the long
dictatorship period and in subsequent years. Crimes against humanity were committed
there such as arbitrary arrests carried out for largely political motives, but also for
reasons of sexual orientation, gender identity, trade union and community militancy,
ethnic discrimination or commitment to the Catalan language and culture. It is the place
where members of the 6th Regional Social Information Brigade, known as the “social–
political brigade”, systematically indulged in acts of ill–treatment and torture of prisoners
with total impunity and violation of their fundamental rights.

Building was used to torture Franco opponents and has been a heated point of contention for pro-independence supporters

For more than two decades, Catalan memorialist associations and associations
of victims have been demanding the conversion of the Prefecture into a site of memory.
The call has met with the support of large social and political majorities, as witnessed at
plenary sessions in the Barcelona City Council and Catalan Parliament, but also in the
Spanish Parliament, which in July 2017 passed a motion to turn it into a memory and
documentation centre aimed at exposing the torture practiced there as a tool of political
repression. Currently, the Congress and the Senate have passed the Democratic
Memory Law that came into force on October 20, which dedicates an entire section to
Memory Sites in order to highlight their function as places for commemoration, homage
or reparation pedagogy.

Furthermore, several international organizations have urged the Spanish State
to guarantee the right to truth and reparation of victims by means of the conversion of
spaces of torture into memory sites, as defined in the report drawn up on July 22, 2014,
by Pablo de Greiff, the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur of truth, justice,
reparation and guarantees of non–recurrence.

This claim must be seen as an addition to actions previously carried out in other
countries, which have culminated in the conversion of places of detention and torture
into centres which are open to the public with an aim to guarantee memory, reparation
and non–recurrence.

However, the mandate of international organizations has not been fulfilled and that is
why we are calling on the Ministry of the Interior and other competent administrations to
take the following steps:

1. The reversal of the building as an operational police centre and the transfer of
the police to an alternative site.

2. The allocation of the Via Laietana Prefecture building and its documentary
collections to the Catalan institutions so that it can be transformed into a site of
memory, documentary archive and a centre for the interpretation of
impunity and torture, especially that occurring during the Franco regime, with
the participation of memorial organizations and testimonies of repression.

Organisations promoting the statement:
1. Amical de Mathausen i altres camps i de totes les víctimes del nazisme
2. Associació Catalana d’Expresos Polítics del Franquisme
3. Ateneu Memòria Popular
4. Comissió de la Dignitat
5. Comissió de la Memòria Històrica – ICAB
6. EUROM
7. Fundació Cipriano Garcia – CCOO CAT
8. Irídia – Centre de Defensa de Drets Humans
9. Mesa de Catalunya d’Entitats Memorialistes
10. Òmnium Cultural

For more information about the campaign, you can click to read the following articles from Catalan News and InSpain News