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ARCHIVED - Spanish Government approves state of alarm and imposes the closure of Madrid
After a month of wrangling and disagreement the national Government has finally acted
The Spanish Government has finally decreed a state of emergency/alarm in the the Region of Madrid and imposed an immediate closure order to try and prevent thousands of Madrilenean families from heading to the coast and holiday homes in other regions of the country for the bank holiday weekend.
The Ministry of Health has ordered that the confinement be effective before 3:00 p.m. to stop the mass exodus which normally occurs before a holiday weekend.
The national Government has finally grown weary of all the arguing and negotiations and has taken decisive action to prevent the further spread of covid -19, but not before the Region of Madrid has become the most infected area in Europe.
The Government ended the national state of alarm 110 days ago and has since worked with the regional governments to try and bring the coronavirus pandemic until control throughout the country by returning control to the 17 regional governments and their individual health authorities to the regional authorities, but has finally resorted once again to this mechanism to re-impose an enforced isolation, for at least 15 days, on almost five million people in Madrid.
This situation has been building for the last month, the regional Government of Madrid , run by the PP, coming under mounting pressure from the national Ministry of Health to increase the measures being undertaken to control the spread of the virus in the capital.
One in three cases in the whole of Spain has been reported in the capital and its outlying districts recently, and to put the situation into context for UK readers, the highest indicences in the UK which are causing the recent spate of lockdowns and intensification of measures are being taken based on an accumulated incidence (IA rate) of just over 500 per 100,000 of population; in Madrid this same level of contagion relates to the areas in which four out of five of the 6.5 million inhabitants of the region live and in some areas of the capital the rate has been as high as 1850 cases per 100,000 of population recently.
Regional Prime Minister Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has been fighting with Prime Minister Sánchez for the last month, refusing to impose tighter restrictions. Initially she imposed a confinement order on 850,000 people in the main urban area of Madrid, which was extended a week later to encompass just one million people, a measure deemed insufficient by the national Health Ministry, which decided to itself forcefully impose a confinement order on four fifths of the Madrid population, which has been in place since last Thursday, the 1st October.
However, this week the plan hit an unexpected obstacle, when the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Madrid (TSJM) courts this Thursday, 8th October, ruled that the confinement order issued by the Government was not valid due to the mechanism used.
The legality of the mechanisms being used by the regional governments in order to impose confinement restrictions has been causing problems for months, as although in most cases the courts accept the need for the exceptional measures, sometimes an individual judge decides to rule against them, deeming that they restrict freedom of movement and are therefore non-constitutional and therefore illegal.
The Government has been criticised many times for its failure to implement specific legislation relating to the coronavirus situation empowering the regional governments and itself, as it now transpires, to impose a confinement order, and indeed, to make certain acts, such as breaching quarantine legally illegal.
Under the Spanish Constitution, freedom of movement is a constitutional right, so restricting this movement can only be undertaken in exceptional circumstances and is something the Government has been working very hard to avoid. In most cases the courts have backed the exceptional circumstances and ruled that the public is not being confined to their homes, and only restrained within a geographical area, so therefore technically, their movement is being restricted, not confined, so have authorised the measures, although in this case they refused to permit the order. The Government could have appealed to the Supreme Court, but this would have taken time and with the urgency of the bank holiday weekend looming and the probability that hundreds of thousands of people would leave the capital this afternoon for a holiday weekend, the Government had very little in the way of alternatives, other than for the regional Government itself to impose an order, something which the regional president has resisted doing from day one.
Pedro Sánchez warned Isabel Ayuso yesterday that unless she herself implemented a confinement order, he would enforce a state of emergency and, after extending his ultimatum for a few hours, hoping that the regional leader would give in to his demands, he gave the green light for the Council of Ministers, chaired by Vice President Carmen Calvo, to be held at 12 noon and authorized, de facto, the intervention of the region to force a perimeter confinement of the capital of Spain and the nine largest municipalities in the region.
The implementation of the state of alarm was accompanied by the immediate order to reactivate automatically after 3:00 p.m. each and every one of the restrictions that the Ministry of Health had already imposed by force last week and that were in force until Thursday.
This means that perimeter restrictions apply to the urban centre of Madrid and the same outlying areas of the Region of Madrid as were contained a week ago. Residents are not confined to their homes, but must remain with the borders of their municipality.
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