Madrid Lawyers Plan Action

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31904, 4 February 1969, Page 15

Madrid Lawyers Plan Action

(N.Z.P.A -Reuter —Copyright) MADRID, February 3. General Franco was out shooting partridge during the week-end as uncowed Madrid lawyers planned action to defend 17 colleagues and other opposition figures banished from the capital under a three-month state of emergency.

Opposition sources believe that hundreds, or even thousands of people have been arrested throughout Spain since the Head of State decreed the emergency nine days ago to stamp out student riots.

According to the last available official figure, 251 people have been detained.

Fifty lawyers met at the Palace of Justice yesterday and voted to press for a special meeting of the Madrid College of Lawyers to discuss the deportations and to decide on further appeals to the authorities.

The Ministry of Justice had earlier rejected a petition by the executive committee of the college to lift the orders banishing the 17 lawyers to remote country districts.

Among speakers at yesterday’s meeting was Professor Joaquin Ruiz Jiminez, a distinguished jurist who was once General Franco’s Ambassador to the Vatican.

In Madrid, the police are detaining members of the executive committee of the Friends of U.N.E.S.C.O. club, which was shut down by the authorities last week-end, according to a committee member who said he was “on the run.”

Opposition sources , say members of the illegal Workers’ Commission, an underground labour movement controlled by Communists and Left-wing Roman Catholics, have been sleeping in different houses every night to avoid arrest.