From the BBC:
“Covid: Spain's top court
rules lockdown unconstitutional”
Spain's top court has ruled that
last year's strict coronavirus lockdown was unconstitutional. The ruling leaves
the door open for people who were fined for breaking the rules to reclaim the
money they paid. But the court said it would not accept lawsuits from people
and businesses who want to sue the government because they lost money due to
the lockdown. The government declared a state of emergency on 14 March 2020 to
curb the first wave of Covid-19 infections. At the time, coronavirus cases and
deaths were rising and hospitals were quickly becoming overwhelmed. Since then,
more than 81,000 people in Spain have died with coronavirus.
Spain has three levels of
emergency: state of emergency, state of exception, and the highest level, state
of siege. Under the emergency rules almost all people in the country were
ordered to stay at home, and were only permitted to leave for essential
reasons. All but essential businesses were closed. The laws were in place until
June 2020, though some restrictions were reinstated later in the year when the
country faced a second wave. But Spain's Constitutional Court said in a
statement that it had voted, by a slim majority of six to five, to find that
the state of emergency was not enough to give the restrictions constitutional
backing. This is because the rules were equivalent to a suppression of
fundamental rights, it said. In order to legally limit people's freedoms to the
extent they did last year, the court said, the government would have had to
declare a state of exception rather than a state of emergency. The ruling was
in response to a suit brought by the far-right political party Vox.
^ I know many more Local,
Regional and National Governments around the world that broke their own laws in
2020 and 2021. Spain is the not the exception, but the rule. ^
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