Henri Parot was a French member of ETA who commanded its itinerant "Argala" commando between 1978 and 1990. The Audiencia Nacional, Spain's national criminal court in Madrid, convicted him in 26 separate sentences that together run to nearly 4,800 years. The victims' association Covite puts the number of murders behind those judgments at 39. They include the Zaragoza attack of December 11, 1987, in which eleven people died, children among them and 88 more were injured.
His name is also attached to a rule of Spanish law. In 2006 the Supreme Court decided an appeal he had brought over how his sentences should be combined, and the method it adopted, which kept long-term prisoners in custody well beyond the date calculated before, became known as the Parot doctrine. The European Court of Human Rights set it aside in October 2013 in the case of another prisoner, Inés del Río Prada, and Spain released dozens of inmates in the following months. Parot himself remained in custody because of a further 11-year sentence imposed in 2007 for membership of an armed gang.
He was arrested in Seville on April 2, 1990 and has been in custody since. On September 9, 2026 the Basque Government, which now manages prisons in the region, granted him third-degree classification, the semi-open regime. On September 16 the prosecutor's office of the Audiencia Nacional appealed, calling the decision premature.
Parot was born in 1958 in Sidi Bel Abbès in Algeria and holds French nationality. As a minor he moved to Bayonne, in the French Basque Country, and there he began contacts with the radical Basque nationalist left and learned Basque.
In 1978 he met a senior ETA leader who assigned him his first killing. Soon afterward he was put in charge of the itinerant commando, a unit made up of French citizens who crossed the border to carry out attacks in Spain and returned to France. The unit was known as the Argala commando. Its attacks over about twelve years left nearly 40 people dead and more than 200 injured.
The first conviction concerns José Luis Legasa Ubiría, who died in Irún on November 2, 1978. The Audiencia Nacional sentenced Parot to 32 years on June 14, 1993 for the killing and found that it was carried out because Legasa had not paid a sum that ETA had demanded from him the year before. It is the earliest of the deaths for which Parot was convicted.
Carmen Pascual died in Madrid on May 17, 1987 in an attack near the headquarters of the Guardia Civil, the Spanish paramilitary police force. Five other people were hurt. Parot did not stand trial alone for the attack. In October 2000 the Audiencia Nacional sentenced the ETA leader Francisco Múgica Garmendia to 109 years for it, and the ruling relied chiefly on Parot's own statements identifying the leader of the commando. Múgica denied involvement at every stage.
The attack for which Parot is best known took place in Zaragoza on December 11, 1987. Eleven people died. Six of them were adults and the others were children. Eighty-eight people were injured, many of them seriously. Many of the dead and injured belonged to Guardia Civil families. It was the deadliest attack attributed to the commando.
The Audiencia Nacional sentenced Parot for Zaragoza in March 1994. In 2003 two senior ETA figures, Francisco Múgica Garmendia and José María Arregui, were also convicted over the attack. In France, a Paris court sentenced three other members of the Argala commando to life imprisonment in 1997.
Parot's convictions cover a series of further deaths in Spain between 1978 and 1989. Conrada Muñoz Herrera died in Granada on August 11, 1989. Carmen Tagle González died in Madrid on September 12, 1989. In a 2022 letter to the prison authorities Parot named 33 victims, among them Carmen Tagle González. The deaths for which he was convicted run from the first in Irún in November 1978 to the last in November 1989, and most took place in Madrid.
Parot was arrested in Seville on April 2, 1990 and entered prison on April 7. Three other members of the commando, all French nationals, were arrested the same month in the French Basque Country. Because France did not extradite its own nationals at that time, they were tried in Paris, where they received life sentences. The three were released on conditional terms between 2020 and 2022. Parot, who had been arrested on Spanish soil, was tried in Spain.
The first sentence came on December 18, 1990: 86 years' imprisonment from the Audiencia Nacional. About 25 further convictions followed over the next six years, including the sentence of 32 years on June 14, 1993 for Irún and the 1994 sentence for Zaragoza. By the end of 1996 the court had passed 26 sentences. The combined total comes to almost 4,800 years, 4,797 by the exact count, for offenses committed since 1978.
At the time the law set a ceiling. Under Article 70 of the 1973 Penal Code, applicable to offenses committed before the 1995 Penal Code, no prisoner could serve more than 30 years in total, however many sentences he had received. Remission for work in prison reduced the 30 years further. The way that reduction was calculated became the center of Parot's case.
In early 2005 Parot asked the Audiencia Nacional to combine his sentences under rule 2 of Article 70 of the 1973 Penal Code, which allows a court to merge penalties and cap them at 30 years. On April 6, 2005 the prosecutor proposed splitting the sentences into two periods, one for offenses up to 1982 and one for offenses from 1984 onward. On April 26, 2005 the Audiencia Nacional accepted that approach and set two successive 30-year maximums. With work remission, the court said, the longest term would be 40 years.
Parot appealed. On February 28, 2006 the Supreme Court, in judgment 197/2006, rejected the reasoning of the Audiencia Nacional, ruling that the sentences should be merged by chronology alone. It then held that the 30-year limit is not a new, separate penalty and that remission for work should be applied to each individual sentence, not to the 30-year total. Because each sentence was reduced separately and not the 30-year total, release came much later than under the earlier method. Applied to Parot, it meant he could not leave prison before 2020. Three justices dissented: Martín Pallín, Giménez García and Andrés Ibáñez.
The judgment reversed a position the Supreme Court had held since March 8, 1994, when it treated the 30-year maximum as a new and autonomous sentence to which prison benefits applied. The method was named after Parot, the first prisoner whose time in prison was extended by it.
In prison, Parot wrote a letter in 2001 urging ETA's leadership to continue its attacks. On February 2, 2007 the Audiencia Nacional (Sentencia 3/2007) sentenced him to 11 years for membership of an armed gang, with an aggravating circumstance of recidivism. The Supreme Court confirmed the 11 years. Because the offense fell under the 1995 Penal Code, the sentence fell outside the merger of the sentences under the 1973 code. It kept Parot in prison after those sentences had reached their limit.
The doctrine was tested on behalf of another prisoner. Inés del Río Prada had been sentenced to more than 3,800 years, and her release, which prison authorities had set for July 2, 2008, was moved by the Audiencia Nacional to June 27, 2017 after it applied the 2006 method. She applied to the European Court of Human Rights on August 3, 2009.
On July 10, 2012 a chamber of the court found a violation of Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the rule against retroactive punishment, and ordered her release. Spain's government asked for a referral to the Grand Chamber, which accepted it on October 22, 2012 and held a hearing on March 20, 2013. On October 21, 2013 the Grand Chamber found, unanimously, a violation of Article 5(1), the right to liberty, because from July 3, 2008 her detention was not lawful. It found a violation of Article 7 by 15 votes to 2, holding that the retroactive application of the new case law had extended her imprisonment by almost nine years. It ordered her immediate release (16 votes to 1) and awarded 30,000 euros in moral damages (10 votes to 7), with 1,500 euros for costs.
Spain's Interior Ministry said the doctrine had been applied to 54 ETA prisoners, nine members of other armed groups and 14 common criminals. Over the following year and more the courts released dozens of prisoners to whom it had been applied. The victims' association AVT held a press conference in Madrid to denounce the ruling. Spain's justice minister said the government respected the judgment but disagreed with it.
The 2006 judgment was applied to other prisoners within weeks. The Audiencia Nacional recalculated release dates one by one, and the prisoners appealed to the Constitutional Court. On March 29, 2012 that court rejected 28 of 31 appeals and upheld three, whose prisoners left prison. Its judgment of the same date in the case of Joseba Koldobika Artola Ibarretxe, published in the official gazette on April 27, 2012, shows the pattern: his sentences had been merged in 1996 under a 30-year cap, a 1997 calculation set his release for June 10, 2016, and after the Supreme Court's new method the Audiencia Nacional moved the date to September 19, 2018. The Constitutional Court denied his appeal, treating the constitutional provision on rehabilitation as a mandate to the legislator and not an enforceable fundamental right. Two judges dissented, one of them writing that the principle of legality had been violated.
The Supreme Court held to the doctrine in 2013. On April 3 it confirmed its application to one prisoner on the ground that social reintegration "is not a fundamental right," and on June 18 it did so again in another case. In September about fifty members of parliament from several parties signed a manifesto against it. Strasbourg's judgment of October 21, 2013 concerned Inés del Río Prada, who had been sentenced to 3,838 years for terrorist offenses that included 19 killings, and whose case had begun in 1989. The court held that she "could not reasonably have foreseen" the change in how work remission was calculated. Spain released her the day after the ruling. By Spanish press counts, about 61 ETA prisoners and more than fifteen common prisoners stood to be affected, and 36 ETA prisoners had already filed appeals with the Spanish courts.
Spain's Audiencia Nacional, based in Madrid, tries terrorism cases. Under the earlier method some prisoners with sentences of more than a thousand years could have been freed after about twenty years. The Constitutional Court partly modified the result on April 28, 2008, requiring that time in pretrial detention be counted against every sentence, and on March 29, 2012 it rejected 28 of 31 appeals against the doctrine.
Prison grades are set under a separate system. A prisoner is classified in first, second or third degree, the third being a semi-open regime. A prison treatment board proposes the grade, and a central supervision court attached to the Audiencia Nacional reviews it. Since October 2021 the Basque Government has run the prisons in the Basque Country. In July 2026 the supervision court returned two other ETA prisoners to second degree after the prosecutor appealed, calling the third-degree grants premature.
Parot spent about eleven years in first-degree conditions, which are the strictest, in several prisons. He was later moved to second degree. He completed three-quarters of his sentence in February 2020. In March 2021 the Spanish prison authority moved him from Andalusia to a prison in the Castilla y León region and advanced him to second degree. In June 2021 the Audiencia Nacional approved a new calculation of his sentence, taking 20 months off after counting time in pretrial detention from February 21, 2006 to November 2, 2007, and setting the completion date at July 10, 2029. His defense had asked for 24 months and the prosecutors had supported 22.
In September 2021 a platform supporting ETA prisoners called a march in Arrasate-Mondragón to protest his prison conditions. The Audiencia Nacional judge declined to ban it and the Basque High Court saw no grounds for a ban. The organizers suspended it on September 17, and victims' associations held their own events in Madrid, San Sebastián, Zaragoza and Granada.
In 2022 Parot wrote to the prison treatment board that it was necessary to recognize the suffering of the victims of terrorism and that what had happened should never have happened. In June 2025 the Audiencia Nacional granted him six days of leave. The supervision judge, José Luis Castro, described his progress as favorable, noted excellent results in prison activities and put the flight risk at 5 percent.
In 2025 he was given semi-liberty under Article 100.2 of the Prison Regulations, an arrangement that allows more flexible conditions without third-degree status. A judge's order of June 19, 2025 endorsed a unanimous decision of the treatment board of March 2025. He left prison from Monday to Friday for volunteer work and returned to sleep there.
On September 9, 2026 the Basque Government's justice department confirmed that it had classified Parot in the third degree, on the proposal of a Basque prison treatment board. It cited his letter rejecting all violence and calling for recognition and repair of the harm done, completion of three-quarters of his sentence, no disciplinary sanctions, participation in prison programs, two earlier leaves without incident and a very low flight risk. The prosecutor's office was to decide whether to appeal.
Covite called the decision "fraudulent" and "unacceptable," saying he had shown no real, public and verifiable repentance. The AVT asked the prosecutor to consider an appeal, and the party Vox made a formal request to the same effect on September 14.
On September 16, 2026 the prosecutor's office of the Audiencia Nacional appealed to the Central Prison Supervision Court. It accepted that Parot had behaved well, that the Article 100.2 regime had worked properly and that he had family and social support, but argued that too little time had passed since that regime began for those factors to be treated as consolidated.
The number of deaths attributed to Parot varies. The victims' association Covite and most summaries give 39 murders, and in his 2022 letter he named 33 victims. Higher figures have circulated, but they do not reflect convictions.
Whether the third-degree classification of September 2026 stands depends on the prosecutor's appeal to the Central Prison Supervision Court.
1958: Born in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria.
1978: Joins ETA; November 2, Legasa dies in Irún.
1987: May 17, Carmen Pascual dies in Madrid; December 11, eleven die at Zaragoza.
1989: August 11, Conrada Muñoz Herrera dies in Granada; September 12, Carmen Tagle González dies in Madrid.
1990: April 2, arrested in Seville; December 18, first sentence of 86 years.
1993: June 14, 32 years for Irún.
1994: March, Zaragoza sentence.
1997: Paris court sentences three other commando members to life.
2005: April 26, Audiencia Nacional sets two 30-year periods.
2006: February 28, Supreme Court judgment 197/2006.
2007: February 2, 11 years for membership of an armed gang.
2012: July 10, Strasbourg chamber ruling in Del Río Prada v. Spain.
2013: October 21, Grand Chamber ends the doctrine.
2021: March, transferred to Castilla y León; June, sentence calculation cut by 20 months.
2022: Letter to the treatment board.
2025: June, six-day leave; semi-liberty under Article 100.2.
2026: September 9, third degree; September 16, prosecutor appeals.