Last use of capital punishment in Spain

The last use of capital punishment in Spain took place on 27 September 1975 when two members of the armed Basque nationalist and separatist group ETA political-military and three members of the Revolutionary Antifascist Patriotic Front (FRAP) were shot dead by firing squads after having been convicted and sentenced to death by military tribunals for the murder of policemen and civil guards. Spain was Western Europe's last dictatorship at this time and had been unpopular and internationally isolated in the post-war period due to its relations with Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the fact that the authoritarian Spanish leader, Francisco Franco, had come to power by overthrowing a democratically elected government. As a result, the executions resulted in substantial criticism of the Spanish government, both domestically and abroad. Reactions included street protests, attacks on Spanish embassies, international criticism of the Spanish government and diplomatic measures, such as the withdrawal of the ambassadors of fifteen European countries.

This was the last use of the death penalty in Spain; following the death of Francisco Franco, two months later, no further executions took place. The 1978 Spanish Constitution largely abolished the death penalty, with the exception of limited cases in times of war, and these exceptions were abolished in 1995. In 2012, a Basque Government commission found that the processes used to convict two of those executed had violated their rights and awarded compensation to their families.

Franco had come to power in 1939 after the Spanish Civil War, during which various factions had committed mass executions of political opponents. Numerous historians, including Helen Graham,Paul Preston,Antony Beevor, Gabriel Jackson, Hugh Thomas, and Ian Gibson believe that the summary executions of political opponents by the Francoist side, which became known as the "White Terror", was a deliberate policy. In contrast, the executions their opponents perpetrated lacked the approval of the Spanish government which Franco was seeking to overthrow. The death penalty, which had been abolished in 1932 for civil cases, was revived by Franco in 1938.

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Wikipedia