A Few Interesting News Stories from the BBC and the NYTimes

While I am preparing the post on my trips to San Sebastián and Zaragoza, three interesting stories from the BBC and the NYTimes:

First, here is a BBC story on the Congreso de Diputados decision to pass a law to curtail the universal jurisdiction of one of Spain's high court, the Audencia Nacional, which can pursue war crime cases against individuals or organizations in other countries.

Second, another piece from the BBC on the exodus of British expats from Spain back to the UK:

Finally, two pieces: an older piece from the NYTimes about the exodus of immigrants from various EU countries including Spain to their countries of origin and a piece from the BBC that focuses on the same phenomenon in Spain.

A few thoughts: Spain's Audencia Nacional has frequently been the forum for individuals living in Spain to lodge complaints against various institutions and laws. Although the nation's Tribunal Supremo also receives complaints from individuals living in Spain, its jurisdiction does not extend to international human rights violation cases. (The Tribunal Constitucional, which issues the sentences that form the foundation of my research, can only rule on constitutional matters based on appeals filed by diputados, the parliaments of the nation's 17 autonomous communities, or the ombudsman, the Defensor del Pueblo.) In this sense, the Congreso's decision to pass this law has undermined the legal framework for the prosecution of human rights violation cases because it undermined a legal body's ability to push forward cases of war crimes without any temporal restrictions. (The ICC can only prosecute cases from the date of its inception, 2002. The arrest warrant against the president of Sudan, Omar Al-Bashir, emerged from war crimes committed during 2004-2005.)

Although I have been critical of the Spanish government's decisions to curtail the rights of immigrants and refugees vis a vis the reforms of the laws regulating these two trends, I am quite surprised to see the Congreso taking steps to limit the country's ability to promote the protection of human rights abroad. Diplomatic pressures aside, I think it demonstrates another manner that the Spanish Government has begun to capitulate its dedication to human rights, especially after it managed to pass through major legislation on gay rights (gay marriage is legal in Spain) and a massive regularization of undocumented immigrants in 2005.

As for the three pieces related to immigration, a few things to note: immigrants from EU member countries excluding Eastern European nations tends to come from the UK and other wealthier nations. The reason is simple: the weather is great, the cost of living is low, and the economy, until 2008, was booming. As a result, Spain saw a major increase in the number of UK expats and retirees coming to live on the coasts of Andalucía and other Communidades Autonomas with beachfront properties. Spain, in other words, functions as the Florida of the EU (without the sketchy dealings of Floridian politics).

Ironically, these same factors also drew immigrants from poorer nations including Eastern European EU member states to Spain even as the Spanish Government under the PP enacted laws that completely restricted the rights of undocumented immigrants and created major adminsitrative to gain residency and work contracts. In fact, the number of immigrants increased during the year 2000 to 2004 under the vigilence of the restrictionist LO 8/2000 and the LO 14/2003, laws that sought to discourage irregular immigration and promote the importation of 'desirable' migrant workers to feed the construction boom that was driving Spain's economic growth.

Given the disparate differences between the origins and laws regulating the movement of these two groups of immigrants, it is interesting but unsurprising to see that economic factors pull them into Spain during a boom and drive them out during a bust. In this sense, the laws of the labor market rather than Spanish immigration laws clearly have a larger impact on the fluctuations of immigrants. From a legal perspective that promotes the rights of immigrants, then, the idea that restricting the rights of immigrants to dissuade them from entering a country is absurd. Instead, the laws must work with the immediate demands of the labor market while preserving the rights of individuals who enter Spain to live and work for an indeterminate amount of time. Whether or not these types of policies come into existence during an economic crisis, however, remains to be seen as the Spanish Government takes on the task of restricting the rights of immigrants as part of a plan to "deal with the recession."