The Constitutional Court has declared that project9kk part of the first state of alarm that was activated in Spain between March 14 and June 21, 2020 is unconstitutional in relation to home confinement . This opens the door now to annul the sanctions that were interposed to those citizens who skipped the prohibition of wandering, but it does not allow to claim from the State the losses suffered by businesses.
The security forces imposed more than a million sanctions throughout Spain during that first state of alarm, although most of them were not charged. The fine print of the Constitutional ruling will be key to knowing how the refund of the fines can be claimed. A process that is now moving in limbo.
The fines that have not been processed, decline; those processed but without payment, will be rendered ineffective, and those who have already paid the penalty may claim from the administration the refund of the amount they paid.
The doctor and professor of Administrative Law at the University of Girona, Josep Maria Aguirre , explains in statements to this newspaper that the fine print of the TC ruling – which has not yet been published – must be meticulously analyzed to determine whether these payments ” they become improper charges “, a fact that would imply that the administration has the obligation to return them with interest for late payment of 3.75%, calculating the time that passed from payment to return of the amount or if the ruling contains” small print “.
“It may be that the TC limits the return effect of these sanctions only to those who have filed an appeal,” he exemplifies, so he calls for caution until the entire content of the high court ruling is known.
“The administration can return the amount of the sanctions ex officio, but the normal thing is that it requests an instance of part”, he points out. How? The most common, he adds, is that a form is made available to citizens in which they can claim their contribution, as happened with the pharmacy fee .
115 million in fines
During the first state of alarm, most of the sanctioning proceedings resolved in Spain, except in Catalonia and the Basque Country, were supported by the Citizen Security Law, known as the ‘gag law’ and amounted to 115 million euros, of of which 51.7 million are penalties paid through the advance payment of the fine.
The sanctions resolved with these regulations amount to 87,047 on which there is already a resolution proposal and 75,217 with the file concluded with the bonus for early payment. We must add another 49,180 of which the files are being processed in the sub-delegations of the Government, but which still do not have a resolution proposal.
The amount to be paid for this type of infraction ranges between 601 and 30,000 euros, but in most cases they have been settled with the minimum penalty and proof of this is that the average payment among the files with a proposed resolution is 732 euros and among the sanctions accepted the prompt payment of a total of 687 euros.
