Spanish environmental pie-hurlers could face lengthy jail terms

Four environmental activists who threw pies at Navarre’s regional president in 2011 are due to appear before a Madrid court on Monday in a case their lawyer has compared to the Spanish Inquisition.

The four men are members of Mugitu, a group formed to fight against the development of a high-speed train network which would run through forestland in the Pyrenees. They stand accused of "energetically hurling pies in the face of Yolanda Barcina Angulo", president of the north-eastern Spanish region of Navarre.

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The wingnut Popular Party leader was attending a public meeting in Toulouse (France) in October 2011 when group leader Gorka Ovejero approached her with a pie concealed in a file. Spain’s Public Ministry reported Barcina was left “dazed and disoriented” when first Ovejero pummeled her in “an energetic fashion” and then the three attackers covered her face and clothes with white cream pies.

"This case reveals the very worst side of the Spanish judicial system and its total lack of contact with reality,” defense lawyer Gonzalo Boye told The Guardian. “It shows a corrupt judicial and political class prepared to use public resources to try people that have done nothing more than demonstrate their opposition to the destruction of the forest. If these people are convicted, the court will look like a tribunal during the Inquisition rather than a modern court of law."