Dani Alves, the Brazilian football star, faces an ongoing legal battle as his defense prepares an appeal against a prison sentence of four and a half years. The prosecution and private accusing party are weighing potential appeals, while the Barcelona Appeals Court Section 21 expects to keep drawing media attention in the coming weeks with the Alves case. The judges must decide on the likely request from the player’s attorney for provisional release from jail while his appeals are considered.
Unlike some judges, the three magistrates who convicted Alves – Maria Isabel Delgado, Pablo Diez, and Luis Belesta – rarely appear in public. Yet their rulings have been the focus of political and social debate, with supporters arguing that the section is among the more conservative in the Barcelona Appeals Court, according to a lawyer familiar with the case.
Regarding the sexual assault verdict, judicial sources note that the sentence is standard for such offenses. The chamber indicated it did not show the same sensitivity as other divisions when it comes to gender violence, stressing that the court sought to document, in the verdict, that the events occurred under the regime of the initial and controversial law known as the yes means yes law, which set sexual assault penalties between four and twelve years of prison.
A prestigious section
However, several lawyers consulted for this newspaper described the panel as capable and rather absolutionist, noting a tendency to resolve doubts in favor of the defendant. They added that the chamber operates efficiently, unlike other sections within the Barcelona Appeals Court that face heavier caseloads, and that its opinions are well grounded in existing jurisprudence.
Despite this, the same lawyers who analyzed the Alves ruling explained that the court questioned the victim’s conduct in the verdict compared with what camera footage showed before entering the restroom but later took a firm stance on consent. Doubts about what happened there might exist, as would normally favor the accused, but the chamber fully believed the victim’s account of declining sexual relations.
Decisions against the process
In recent weeks, this court confirmed a sentence of two years and four months of prison for a protester convicted of ideologically motivated coercion during a demonstration against the visit of the king and the prime minister to Barcelona in October 2020, the act involving a cross painted on a Spanish flag.
Additionally, the judge Belesta, who authored the Alves verdict, wrote a separate opinion against the initial 72-hour prison permit granted to Jordi Cuixart, then president of Omnium Cultural, in 2020, arguing that there was a high risk of recidivism and that no corrective prison treatment had been completed. Cuixart was released with the other two magistrates voting in his favor.
In June 2021, Belesta also served on the panel that convicted a separate activist for five years for an assault during a protest against a Jusapol event in Barcelona. A few months later, the Catalonia High Court reduced the sentence to one and a half years for disorder and assault on authority after a resource was granted by the convict.
Pascual Estevill
The section is comprised of six magistrates who share responsibilities for trials and appeal reviews. In recent years, a plan to ease court congestion has sometimes involved bringing in extra judges, earning recognition from the Catalan High Court as it publishes decisions within a tight timeframe, including the Alves case.
The section’s chair, Maria Isabel Delgado, previously worked in the Juvenile Justice and Prison Oversight courts, and was involved in a notable 2003 decision revoking a special early release granted to a former judge, vilified for fraud. Delgado also led the initial distribution of the case from the Barcelona Instruction Court No. 13 against several Generalitat officials linked to a major organizational event, though the investigation remains ongoing.
Online harassment cases
With a long judicial career that includes service in Bilbao, Girona, and other Barcelona divisions, magistrate Pablo Diez once presided over the jury that, in 2019, sentenced a woman to twenty years for murder after she threw her baby from a window following childbirth in Barcelona. The verdict reflected a clear finding of intent and knowledge of the death that would follow.
In recent years, Diez also spent time at the Alicante Provincial Court, where he was part of the panel that upheld a conviction requiring a woman to pay damages for sharing a nude photo to mock a man online, and he rejected an appeal that maintained a fine against a man who harassed a woman by phone for months.