Josep Antoni Acebillo cannot be blamed for procedural laziness. The former chief architect of Barcelona until 2003 (during the PSC mandates) has tried to reopen the complaint filed two years ago against the former mayor Ada Colau and the former deputy mayor of Urban Planning Janet Sanz for the pedestrianization promoted by the Comuns when they governed the Catalan capital. His attempt has failed because the judge has rejected his claim, as elDiario.es has learned.
Celebrated and awarded in half of Europe But contested by merchants and large local employers, the so-called superblocks of Barcelona (the pedestrianization of central streets) were also part of the avalanche of complaints that the former mayor and her government team received. They have all been archived and even a magistrate wrote that Colau suffered a judicial war by vulture funds and other political rivals.
Acebillo, in addition to forcefully criticizing the superblocks in the press and public events, joined the judicial process against them. He resorted to the criminal court and not to the contentious-administrative court, the usual way to discuss the decisions of a City Council. The complaint called the project an “urban attack” and, despite including the crimes of prevarication and embezzlement, dedicated more pages to politically discrediting the project than to listing criminal evidence.
First he tried in the Prosecutor's Office, where he received his first setback, and then he reiterated his complaint before a judge, who opened a case but ruled out the former architect's other requests, such as summoning Colau and Sanz to testify or provisionally stopping the works (in the middle of the 2023 municipal electoral campaign).
The case did not go any further and, like the rest of the complaints against Colau, it ended up being filed at the end of 2023. The judges of the Barcelona Court reminded Acebillo, represented by lawyer Francesc Jufresa, that the principle that should govern criminal proceedings is that of minimal intervention, that is, that not everything illegal is criminal.
This is what happened with the superblocks: the interests of those opposed to the project were already “protected,” the judges noted, through appeals in the contentious jurisdiction (which annulled the projects due to errors in their processing), so it was not necessary to add criminal proceedings. The PSC and Jaume Collboni government has for now rejected planning more pedestrianization of this type in Barcelona.
A year and a half later, Acebillo collected five contentious rulings that annulled the pedestrianizations because they were not processed through a modification of the general metropolitan plan, but rather as a municipal government measure, and presented them to the Court of Investigation 26 of Barcelona to request that the case against Colau and Sanz be reopened.
In Acebillo's opinion, those sentences that annulled the pedestrianizations were “new facts” that, as in all criminal cases when they appear, forced it to be reopened. The former architect omitted the fact that the Barcelona Court had already relied, to file the case, on a contentious ruling that brought down the superblock project.
The former architect also cited a ruling from the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) that confirmed the annulment of the project, but ignored that it contained a dissenting vote in favor of it from a judge, as Colau and Sanz's lawyers, Olga Tubau and Àlex Solà, warned the judge. At the contentious level, the superblocks are awaiting the final rulings of the Supreme Court.
In his writing, Acebillo charged against the Barcelona Court for having dismissed the case and placing him “in total defenselessness.” He also asked that the case be reopened without having to pay bail like every plaintiff or that it be a “symbolic” amount, since he maintained not to follow “any particular interest but only the interest of the city.”
The prosecutor also opposed Acebillo's claim by verifying that from his writing “no new factual fact emerges” that has changed the legal assessment that was made when filing the case in 2023, that is, the non-existence of a crime.
“There was no clear, manifest, forceful and indisputable violation of urban planning regulations in the municipal action,” indicated the prosecutor, a phrase that the court magistrate adopted to deny, in two paragraphs, Acebillo's request on July 30. The former architect has not said the last word and has appealed the court's refusal to reopen the 'superilles' case.