Another victory against BDS in Spain: A High Court upheld a ruling deeming a pro-boycott resolution discriminatory and illegal.
A Spanish court dealt yet another legal defeat to the anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement.
The Spanish High Court of Justice in Madrid last week upheld the decision of a lower Madrid court, which annulled in January a resolution by the City Council of Rivas Vaciamadrid to boycott Israel, saying it was “discriminatory.”
In May 2016, the City Council of Rivas Vaciamadrid, a suburb of some 80,000 inhabitants and a hotbed of communist support in Madrid, passed a decision fully boycotting Israeli institutions, companies, and organizations or those involved in the so-called “occupation.”
The City Council also agreed to engage and promote cooperation with the BDS movement to ensure the “proper implementation” of the boycott decision.
ACOM, a Spanish non-profit that works to combat BDS, and has succeeded in several court cases against the movement, took legal action against the vote.
In July 2016, a court in Madrid issued an interlocutory writ of injunction ordering the City Council to refrain from carrying out the boycott.
In January, the court fully nullified the Council’s boycott decision.
This latest ruling reaffirms the BDS’s “discriminatory, biased and decidedly hostile character against Israel, its citizens, and anyone sympathetic to the Jewish State,” ACOM stated.
In addition, the judicial decision strongly stressed the idea that resolutions by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on the issue provide no legal basis for boycotting Israeli institutions.
The Rivas city council was ordered to pay for the legal proceedings.
This is the second ruling of a higher court in Spain against the BDS movement, after lower courts have issued several rulings against them.
In October, a Spanish high court in the Asturias region declared a pro-BDS resolution endorsed by the Langreo City Council illegal and discriminatory.
Over the past two years, pro-Israel activists have obtained tens of rulings and injunctions against the BDS movement in Spain.
The BDS movement promotes financial, academic, and cultural boycotts against Israel, ostensibly as a nonviolent struggle against the so-called “Israeli occupation.” Critics say its activities are a modern form of anti-Semitism and that its true objective is to destroy the State of Israel.
By: Max Gelber, United with Israel