One of the last surviving fighters from the guerrilla war waged against the Franco dictatorship in the 1940s is suing the Spanish government for €1m in reparations.

Barcelona-born Joan Busquets, 96, suffered torture, forced labour and 20 years in prison at the hands of the Franco regime. The case comes in response to Spain’s Democratic Memory law, passed in 2022, which offers “moral reparations” to the regime’s victims.

“The law offers to help victims of torture, forced labour and exile under the dictatorship but the small print says they are not entitled to financial compensation,” Busquets said. “It’s symbolic, but my imprisonment wasn’t symbolic.”

After the fascist victory in the civil war in 1939, thousands of republicans fled to France, many of whom went on to fight with the French resistance, popularly known as the maquis, during the Nazi occupation.

At the end of the second world war a number of them returned to Spain where they established guerrilla groups – also called maquis – dedicated to undermining the Franco regime.

Busquets, then 20, joined the group led by Marcel·lí Massana in Berguedà in northern Catalonia, which smuggled arms and explosives over the Pyrenees on foot.

Carrying 40kg packs, they made the six-day journey from France to the town of Manresa by night. “I bought a pair of boots but it turned out they were both for the same foot so I spent two and half days crossing the mountains barefoot,” said Busquets. “My feet were a wreck.”

His life as a guerrilla was short-lived. After a year in the mountains he was arrested and taken to the notorious torture centre on Vía Laietana in Barcelona.

There, he and his comrades were subjected to three weeks of sleep deprivation before being sentenced to death by a military court. Busquets’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment – he doesn’t know why – while the others were executed by firing squad at Camp de la Bota, now the site of the Primavera Sound music festival.

In 1956 Busquets broke his leg in a failed escape from prison in Valencia. When two Guardia Civil officers came across him, they assumed he was dead, and one of them kicked him in the face, splitting his nose in two.

Later two prisoners brought him back to jail where he was denied medical help and left on a concrete floor for seven days before being finally taken to hospital. As a result, he believes, he has suffered a variety of lifelong health problems.

Released on licence in 1969 after serving 20 years, he found work with a publisher in Barcelona but says the police made his life intolerable.

“I went in secret to France where I was granted political asylum,” he said. “My old comrade Marcel·li Masana was in Paris. It took me some time to adapt to normal life. There was no such thing as psychological help, on the contrary, but I had the good fortune to meet the perfect partner who helped me integrate.”

The 2022 Democratic Memory law is the first to recognise the guerrillas who continued to fight the republican cause after defeat in the civil war. Busquets’s claim, which is being supported by the CGT trade union, is based on the (non-binding) 2005 UN resolution for reparations for victims of international human rights violations.

“We say that if the sentence of death, later commuted to 20 years in prison, the five years of forced labour, persecution and torture followed by years of exile, if all of this was perpetrated by a state since declared illegal and illegitimate then, according the UN resolution on reparations, the Spanish state is responsible,” said Raúl Maíllo, the lawyer representing Busquets.

During the transition to democracy after Franco’s death in 1975, amnesty was granted to anyone who had committed crimes on behalf of the regime. Subsequent laws that have absolved the regime’s victims have stopped short of anything but symbolic reparations.

Emilio Silva, the president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARHM), says the state “chooses its victims”. “The state pays compensation to the families of the victims of Eta [the Basque terror group], and no one says they shouldn’t, but there’s nothing for the victims of the dictatorship,” he said.

Maíllo says that, to his knowledge, no case such as this has been successful but Busquets, a lifelong anarcho-syndicalist, is not deterred.

“It’s not about the money,” he said. “It’s about justice. This country hasn’t made reparations to the victims. Years ago I wrote about my case to the then Catalan president, José Montilla. He didn’t reply. I wrote to the former Spanish president Felipe González and he didn’t reply either. This has given me the strength to carry on fighting.”

He added: “Being an anarchist now is no different from 50 years ago. It’s a philosophy and a search for truth. What I want is unity, of Europe and, were it possible, of the whole world, without frontiers, a world in which we all understand each other.”