March 6, 2022
(Taken from Radiocane)
Q: Listeners have probably already had the opportunity to learn about the events that you have lived throughout your long imprisonment in Spanish jails from reading your biography. Let’s start now with the case that led to your current detention in France. What facts does this case refer to?
A: Yes, I have a 10-year sentence set by the Paris Criminal Court on November 8, 2019, for armed robbery and kidnapping. This sentence was recently reduced, a week ago, to five years. And my release date is scheduled for May 16, 2025, so three years from now. This is due to a calculation of the credits for sentence reduction made by the Mont-de-Marsan Prosecutor’s Office, starting from 30 years instead of 25 as the legal limit for the accumulation of sentences in the Spanish system. Well, if this limit had been established by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, if this limit had been enforced, I would have had to be released immediately. Instead, she changed her mind, because she decided that French law should now be applied. A doubly wrong analysis, as my lawyer has already told you in a letter. Technically, it is explained in this way only to understand, in fact, if article 132-23-1 of the French penal code says that convictions pronounced by the criminal jurisdictions of the European Union must be taken into account, on condition that they do not aggravate the situation of the convicted. The legal limit of 30 years of accumulation in French law would therefore be “valid”, in quotations, if I had been sentenced to life imprisonment. This limit would be reduced to 20 years if my sentence had been 30 years, but it is 25 years! So the deliberate error of the prosecutor is obvious. It is Article 362-2 of the French Code of Criminal Procedure. Technically it is quite simple to understand, but when there is a political will behind it that opposes freedom, everything becomes vindictive. Continue reading “France: Telephone interview with Claudio Lavazza”
