MADRID, 30 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Government processed 634,669 sanctions with an amount of 405.8 million euros during the Covid pandemic, in the years 2020 and 2021, for violations of the Organic Law for the Protection of Citizen Security, known by its detractors as the ‘gag law’ ‘, which was approved by the PP government in 2015 and is still in force despite the agreement of the PSOE Executive and United We Can to reform the norm.
According to the information published in the 2021 Statistical Yearbook of the Ministry of the Interior, consulted by Europa Press, 47% of the amount for sanctions was due to disobedience to the authority, according to article 36.6, the same one that the Government resorted to to punish the infractions of citizens who skipped the home confinement decreed since March 2020.
Article 36.6 imposes fines of between 601 and 30,000 euros for “disobedience or resistance” to the authority when the facts do not constitute a crime, “as well as the refusal to identify oneself” or the “allegation of false or inaccurate data”. This is one of the aspects debated by the parliamentary groups that now wish to reform the ‘gag law’, proposing that “corporeal opposition or physical force” be required from now on.
In October 2021, the Government announced through the Ministry of Territorial Policy that it had created a work team to return all the fines that were imposed on citizens due to the state of alarm due to Covid-19. Autonomous communities with powers in the matter have already announced the return.
The official count left a balance of 1,142,127 fines imposed throughout Spain in the first state of alarm and at least 220,296 sanctions in the second state of alarm, according to data from the Ministry of the Interior provided in March 2021, when one year was completed of the first of the alarm states. These are fines that have an administrative procedure, so not all of them were finally notified.
According to the yearbook of the Ministry of the Interior, in 2020, 375,930 sanctions were processed and in 2021 the figure dropped slightly to 258,739. The total figure had its notable impact in terms of sanctions for article 36.6, which experienced an increase of almost 90% when comparing both years: 243,001 sanctions in 2020 compared to 25,630 a year later. For this reason, in 2021 174 million will be collected and in 2021 the figure will drop to 16.4 million euros.
The Ministry of the Interior explains that its yearbook records the files processed by the Central State Administration and that “it is possible that these sanctions correspond to files initiated both in 2021 and prior to that year.”
It is grouped into three large chapters – arms and explosives, drugs and citizen security – and for the amount, “specific circumstances such as the reduction for prompt payment or others” are not taken into account in the published amounts.
The 2021 yearbook of the Ministry directed by Fernando Grande-Marlaska reflects other data such as the fact that 364,320 complaints were processed for administrative infractions in drug matters to the ‘gag law’, which represents an increase of 7.86% in relation to last year .
Regarding arrests for drug trafficking – outside the citizen security law -, last year closed with 27,141 arrests, “which represents an increase of 12.55% over the previous year.”
