The harsh report on Spain given by the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights, presented this Wednesday as a corollary to the visit she made last November, once again underlines the Spanish state's serious deficiencies in the area of freedom of expression. Commissioner Dunja Mijatovic emphasizes the need to review the so-called gag law, so that it fully complies with European and international human rights standards, as well as the requirement to change the Penal Code with respect to sanctions for the glorification of terrorism, insults to the Crown and offences against religious beliefs.
I could not agree more with the position of the Council of Europe, a fundamental piece in the European mechanism and whose pronouncements tend to be, in general, much more critical of the governments that have fewer means to impede use being made of state force. The fact there has been a failure of all the attempts to modify the gag law, approved in the legislature in which the People's Party had an absolute majority in Congress and under the prime ministership of Mariano Rajoy and with Jorge Fernández Díaz in the interior ministry, shows to what extent the parties are hostage to their failures to fulfill their promises when they come to power. And this case is particularly painful because Pedro Sánchez affirmed that this law would be changed the day after he arrived in government and he has held the position since June 2018.
Obviously, electoral promises are easier terrain, an area in which the Spanish PM feels on comfortable turf. We're seeing it currently, when scarcely a day goes by without some news release aimed at winning the headlines of the day. His endless catalogue of commitments for the future contains is full of offers whether on housing or the drought, two issues that undoubtedly weigh his government down and on which he now wants to make a counter move in a battle against the clock. There's not enough room in this article to list all the promises he has made about housing if one is to give them a minimum of description, and even he himself probably wouldn't remember them all. Without a doubt, it is much simpler to review what he has done in the almost five years that he has been prime minister of Spain. But the campaign strategy with which he wants to direct himself especially to young voters is what is probably leading him to this frantic rush of bargain offers until May 28th.
The same goes for the drought, the other big problem. Nothing has more media impact than an extraordinary cabinet meeting to cover up the absence of initiatives to help the sector. Sánchez knows that with not much money he can pick up a lot of electoral bounty and no one is better than him when it comes to playing the game on this ground. Faced with the drought, fall like a fine rain of millions of euros, while the Catalan government, with the problem and the concern much closer to them, is still studying what to do. Some time ago, during the time of Pasqual Maragall as president of Catalonia, a cabinet meeting would have been called at the ground zero point of the drought, which would not have solved the problems but would have transmitted, at least, empathy towards the difficulties of our farmers. It is nothing more and nothing less than that maxim of standing alongside the sector in its difficulties if you later want them to remember you when they go to vote.
But back to the Council of Europe. No one in Madrid will pay any attention to the report of Commissioner Dunja Mijatovic, least of all, the Spanish interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, several times warned and discredited by the European institutions. But it is good that from outside the state, there is a recognition of what people here do not want to see: that political majorities must never be a smokescreen for human rights violations.