Terrorism has struck Spain throughout each of the major international waves, with ETA being the organisation that has had the greatest impact on the country: more than 3,800 attacks, 853 fatalities, 2,632 injured, 86 kidnapped, and countless extorted, threatened, persecuted and displaced. In the post-ETA period, the account of past events is central in order to come to terms with the violence experienced. Future developments will largely depend on how the past is understood.
The narrative is not unique, and several actors contribute to it. Within this framework, the law, through its narrative character, plays a part in explaining what terrorism is. Legal proceedings play a central role in the reconstruction of past events. The account of the proven facts in court judgments is a narrative in which the judge precisely records the facts of the case that have been proven in the light of the available evidence. Then, the judge determines the laws and legal principles that make it possible to classify the facts into legal categories (and to attribute to them legal consequences). Here, by reasonably subsuming —or not— the facts into the terrorist offences. Key to this task is the wording of anti-terrorism laws.
In the aftermath of ETA, a court case —the so-called Alsasua affair— gave rise to a heated popular debate: What is —or what do we consider to be— terrorism? Beyond abstract debates on definitions of terrorism, what is missing in terrorism studies are single-country case studies of how terrorism is defined and why the definition evolves over time.
This thesis puts the focus on the role of anti-terrorist laws in the formation of the concept of ‘terrorism’ in Spain by tracking the evolution of the concept in its legal system from 1894, time of the appearance of the first law aimed at dealing with modern terrorism, to the present day. To this end, it looks at the historical, political and social evolution of terrorist violence and the interactions between this and the law, and vice versa, in the evolution of the concept. This is based on bibliography, hemerography and legal sources: laws, bills, parliamentary discussions, reports and circulars from the public prosecutor's office and judicial decisions.