Not a single day without my country being a worldwide fool, damm.
A group of young settlers arrived
in 2013 and began bringing the village back to life with the blessing
of its former inhabitants. Over the past five years, they have rebuilt
houses, planted vegetables and worked to restore the overgrown village
cemetery.
Their activities have been opposed by the regional government, which
points out that Fraguas lies in public woodland within the Sierra Norte
natural park and argues that their presence is a fire hazard.
Castilla-La Mancha’s high court ruled on Friday that the collective
had unlawfully occupied the site and sentenced six of its members to 18
months’ imprisonment. They were also fined €2,700 (£2,370) each and
ordered to reimburse the regional government for the cost of demolishing
the newly restored areas of Fraguas.
Despite the intervention of local environmentalists, who have been acting as negotiators – and a petition with more than 77,000 signatures in support of the project – the collective now believes prison is inevitable.
Amazing, just amazing. I'm 99% sure the fire hazard comes for being used as training fields by the army, just like all of their propierties. They are allowed to have their bases surrounded by national parks and not keep them clean so from time on time a fire is started by negligence. But hey, poor of you if you are a civilian, you have to go no matter how legal are your building permissions.
I bet my ass all of these people would have likely favoured on cleaning the site if that made it safer, even if that meant pay it with their own pockets.
And then it has been decided to demolish what it has been rebuilt and force them to pay it, truly an 100% spanish decision, sigh.
“We had thought we might be acquitted. We thought the trial had gone
well,” he said. “There were lots of other ways [the regional government]
could have done this. They didn’t have to take it to court. There could
have been negotiations instead, but they went down the criminal route,
which is the toughest one available.”
You people sadly forgot you're in Spain, there's no democratic ways other than this. Especially when dealing with the intouchables like the army or the church.
So sad, but it is important to protect national parks.
So this is basically the classic example of the state not taking care of the land books good, so the landowner gets fucked
Most forests in Spain aren't "natural", they have been managed by man for hundreds of years, cut down and replanted with pines in places there shouldn't be, in the wrong densities and left to their own after they were declared national parks because they were initially considered for their exploitation to make paper or planned to be cut down eventually for wood.
I haven't studied this case, but most forests still need a human management. They have been conditioned to avoid the appearance of fires, which happen naturally in the mediterranean forests, simply by people removing dead trees and branches that might be fuel for the fires during summer, and removing some pyrophyte plants that incentivize the appearance of fires. When human management is removed, they biomass accumulates and eventually a big ass fire will happen. Maybe this fire should let happen to help the ecosystem return to a more naturalized state, but since people and animals live in there we have to do what we can to preserve their lifes.
It might not be what happens in this place, but still the impact these people would have on the national park is nothing compared to the mining exploitations that take place in the park. I could go on but I think I got my point across.
So let me get this right.
They asked the regional government for permission to build there.
Regional government did NOT give them permission to build there.
They built there.
Regional govt is fining them for building there, even though they told them they couldn't build there.
In which country do you guys live where this would've played out different? Like, leaving the appeal to emotion aside... What else did you expect in this situation?
appeal to emotion, because law is a fundemental universal principle and not something us humans make up and change and is totally infallable.
laws exist (in theory, but not in practice) to prevent harm. sometimes they overreach, or actually cause harm (or prevent good), and in these instances it makes no sense to enforce them, which is why discretion -- e.g. deciding not to enforce the law in a situation where no one is being harmed -- is one of the most fundamental elements of law enforcement.
they don't exist for their own sake, and certainly shouldn't be enforced simply because it's the law.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.