Spanish police protest authorities plan to reform ‘gag law’

Tens of 1000’s of Spanish cops and their supporters marched in Madrid on Saturday to protest in opposition to authorities plans to reform a controversial safety regulation recognized by critics because the “gag law.”
Critics of the Citizens Security Law handed by the earlier conservative authorities in 2015 have for years stated that it gave an excessive amount of energy to safety forces in detriment of civil liberties. Powerful police unions, nevertheless, say that the proposed modifications to the regulation will make their job harder.
A brand new model of the regulation sponsored by the small Basque Nationalist Party, or PNV, just lately gained the assist of Spain’s governing left-wing coalition. Amnesty International and Spain’s Ombudsman Office have referred to as for the regulation to be altered.
The proposed regulation may nonetheless endure modifications throughout negotiations within the parliament’s decrease chamber, however because it now stands it might remove a number of the most contentious elements of the present regulation. Those embody the article that banned holding protests within the fast neighborhood of Congress or Senate buildings and the article that allowed border guards to push again migrants who had crossed the frontier.
A brand new tweak that’s supported by the federal government is the allowance for spontaneous protests that now generally come up from fast group of a march, for instance, to reply to a case of gender violence. Currently, organizers of protests or marches ought to inform authorities beforehand.
Police unions are in opposition to different deliberate modifications, above all one to take away a requirement for residents to request permission from authorities earlier than filming and publishing video of officers at work. Last yr, Spain’s Constitutional Court dominated that such a requirement for earlier approval was unconstitutional.
But police concern that would make their officers straightforward to determine and thus put them in danger for reprisals. The proponents of the regulation deny this, promising that the brand new regulation is about hanging a greater stability between liberty and security.
“The reform that the government is preparing will only benefit violent protesters and criminals,” Pablo Pérez, spokesman of the JUPOL union for Spain’s National Police. “It puts citizens and especially police officers in serious danger because it ties our hands and feet when facing violence.”
Right-wing opposition events backed the police protesters. Both the far-right Vox celebration and the Popular Party that handed the unique safety regulation whereas in energy despatched their leaders to the rally.

Socialist Party spokesman Felipe Sicilia stated that authorities desires to “adapt the law to a new era” and rewrite it in order to “reduce doubts about the right to gather in public and to protest.”
“This law is to improve our way of handling public security,” Sicilia stated. “And, of course, it means to protect our members of the security forces so that they can work in a professional manner and with legal guarantees.”