Pedro Varela, well-known as a controversial neo-Nazi historian and bookseller of the city of Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain), former president of CEDADE, a political party that was extinguished in 1993, has been sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for selling 4,375 copies of the ‘Mein Kampf’ – between 1997 and 2010 – without having the rights. The criminal court number 16 of Barcelona, which tried him for a crime against intellectual property, also condemns him to a six-month fine (with a daily fee of six euros) and a year of inability to sell, publish and distribute books. On the other hand, it must pay the costs of the trial as well as compensate the State of Bavaria, Germany, with 67,637.5 euros.
However, the prosecutor requested a sentence of 15 months in jail, a fine of 10,800 euros and three years of disqualification.
Many people also asked that the fine be paid only to associations that fight against the spread of Nazism and negation, and for the memory of the victims of the Shoah.
The well-known and terrible Hitlerian ideology ‘Mein Kampf’ is free of rights from April of 2015. Until that moment, could not be published anywhere in the world without permission of the State of Bavaria, proprietors of the rights of the book of Hitler.
The prosecutor for Crimes of Hate and Discrimination of Barcelona, after a denunciation of the consul of Barcelona, had already acted against Pedro Varela. Last year, the Mossos registered their bookstore, Europe, stopping two shopkeepers accused of promoting hatred. Varela entered briefly in prison, but left shortly after paying a bail.
He has been a judge since 1996, the year of the first registration of his “bookstore”, a socail headquarters of a kind of Nazi association where most texts for sale revolve around the Holocaust, denialism and Nazi Germany. In 1998 he was sentenced to five years in prison for negation, incitement to discrimination, hatred and violence. That is, according to the Spanish penal code, he returns to jail despite being a half-year sentence, because he has a history. In 2007 he was sentenced to seven months’ imprisonment for justification of the genocide.
We take the opportunity to comment that in 2000 the Provincial Court of Barcelona raised a question of constitutionality before the Constitutional Court because it understood that article 607 of the Criminal Code, which sanctioned the denial of the Holocaust, conflicted with freedom of expression .
The European Court of Human Rights condemned in 2013 the State of Spain to pay € 13,000 to Varela, convicted of a crime of justification of the Holocaust of which he was not accused in the first instance. According to the judgment, Spain violated its right to be informed in a timely and detailed manner of the nature and cause of the accusation, and its right to have the time and facilities necessary to prepare its defense.