Draft bill calls for $800,000 fines for protests in Spain’s
Mass Protests Erupt in Response to Bill, Austerity and Bank Bailouts
Unauthorized protesters outside the Spanish Parliament could soon be hit with fines of up to €600,000 ($810,000) while those selling drugs or offering sexual services in front of minors could face a penalty of up to €30,000.The move is part of a new Citizen Security bill drafted by Spain’s ruling Popular Party (PP) which is likely to be approved in Parliament in the near future.
Social uproar in the form of harassment or insults will result in hefty fines of up to €600,000 if the PP’s parliamentary majority gives the law the green light.
Aside from protesting outside government buildings, other “very serious offences” include publishing images/personal data of policemen online, interrupting public events and carrying out so-called escraches (demonstrations outside the homes and workplaces of political figures).
Offences deemed as “serious” on the new bill include insulting or threatening policemen, offering sexual services close to children’s play areas, possession of illegal drugs (regardless of whether they are for self-consumption), vandalism of public property and open-air drinking sessions known in Spain as botellones.
All these infractions will entail fines of between €1,000 and €30,000.
“We’re not looking to punish more, just to reduce the discretionary margin of illicit conducts and not stumble upon a judicial limbo for ‘new’ acts like the escraches,” Spain’s Huffington Post reported the Interior Ministry as saying.
Escraches were carried out in Spain for the first time in 2013, notably by the country’s anti-evictions lobby the PAH, who targeted politicians in their homes as part of their protest against the repossession of thousands of homes over the last few years.
Alex Dunham (alex.dunham@thelocal.com)
Countrywide strike and protest marches next weekend ‘to save the people’
UNION bosses have called for as many residents as possible in Spain to join in protest marches and strikes on November 23 and 24 to ‘save the people’.
Fernando Toxo, secretary-general of the labourers’ commission (CCOO) says the demonstrations, which will be held in all large towns and cities in the southern region of Andalucía on Sunday, November 24 and everywhere else in the country on the Saturday, will carry the slogans, ‘protect what is public, protect pensions, protect people’ because, in his own opinion, “now we’ve bailed out the banks, it’s time to save the people.”
In fact, Spain will not be the only country taking to the streets this month – at least 60 unions, together with members of the public in all 28 European Union member States will stage protest marches to campaign against the ‘economic and social assaults perpetrated by the EU’.
At present, 27 million people in Europe – of whom six million are in Spain – are unemployed and, ‘what’s worse’, says Toxo, is that ‘they have no prospects of getting out of this situation in the foreseeable future’.
He says the ‘voices of the people’ throughout the EU-28 are calling for a ‘radical about-turn’ in policies which are ‘causing a serious social regression’ to ‘times gone by’.
So-called ‘collective negotiation’, whereby unions and different professional and industrial sectors agreed on blanket working conditions for employees in each field and which individual bosses must either adhere to or improve upon by law, has been dramatically cut in Spain, says the CCOO leader.
This means ‘millions of workers’ in Spain have ‘no real legal protection’ in their jobs, Toxo reveals.
He says for the working-age population in the EU-28, the continent-wide association of unions is calling for a radical cross-State investment plan equivalent to two per cent of the European Union’s Gross Domestic Product every year for two years.
“This would be three times less than the six billion euros invested by the EU in bailing out the banks,” says the CCOO spokesman.
The protests will condemn mass unemployment and the total lack of prospects for jobseekers, funding cuts in education and healthcare and restrictions to accessing the latter, as well as the pension reform which will ‘cut spending power for retirees by between 14 and 28 per cent’ and the fact that three million of Spain’s unemployed, or exactly half, receive no dole money or any other kind of State benefits whatsoever – a situation which ‘has got to stop’, according to Toxo.
“It’s time to save the people now,” he stressed, calling for everyone to hit the streets on November 23 and 24.
“We want the population of Spain to rebel in order to tell our government that we’ve had it up to here and cannot take any more,” Toxo concludes.
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