The wife of the Prime Minister Begoña Gómez has had to hand over to the investigating judge, Juan Carlos Peinado, the plane tickets to prove that she indeed flew to the United Kingdom to attend her daughter’s graduation and that she did not go anywhere else. Specifically, she has provided the tickets for the trip to London and the return from Bristol.
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The magistrate requested the evidence proving that she had made the trip for which she requested authorization, once her passport was withdrawn due to flight risk. He authorized her to make the trip but now wants Gómez to prove that she has done so since the passport does not have an entry stamp.
In a statement, the defense of Pedro Sánchez’s wife clarifies to the judge that the UK Border Force (the agency responsible for security at the United Kingdom’s borders) has progressively implemented a border control system based on electronic identity verification procedures and digital entry registration, replacing the traditional stamp.
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“As a consequence of this technological evolution, the manual stamping of the passport has ceased to be the ordinary practice at entry controls, being reserved only for exceptional cases provided for by British immigration regulations or when the traveler must be personally attended by a Border Force agent,” explains lawyer Antonio Camacho.
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Therefore, the absence of an entry stamp in the passport “lacks, by itself, negative evidentiary value.” The lack of a stamp does not allow inferring that Gómez did not enter British territory, “since border control is documented through electronic records generated by the United Kingdom’s immigration authorities, which functionally replace the traditional physical stamping of the travel document,” it explains.
Furthermore, the defense explains that if Peinado suspects that his investigated party may have committed an offense of breach of precautionary measures, it is his responsibility to investigate it but not the defense’s “to prove the non-existence of an unlawful conduct that no one has proven to have occurred.”
Likewise, in the statement, he reproaches the magistrate that proving that something did not happen, when that something is not specified in a specific and determined act or place, “constitutes what procedural doctrine and case law call probatio diabólica: the requirement of an impossible or disproportionately difficult proof that, by its very nature, no litigant can reasonably satisfy.”
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