After a year of negotiations and more than 40 meetings to reach an agreement with which to remove the gag from the Citizen Security law, the political parties that promoted its reform have agreed to unblock it from the deadlock in which it found itself. According to parliamentary sources, the text of the reform will go from the presentation in the Congress of Deputies to the Interior Commission with more than fifty agreed amendments.
However, the usual parliamentary partners have not been able to agree on the most controversial points that separate them: prohibition of rubber balls as riot control material, sanctions for disrespect for authority, fines for disobedience and hot returns.
The reform will thus go to the Commission, where the times cannot be as long as in the previous procedure, so time will press on the PSOE and Unidas Podemos to try to convince their usual allies to obtain the final green light before end of the legislature. The countdown, now yes, is underway.
The meeting of the presentation on Wednesday had been sold by the groups that promote the reform as “the definitive one”. On one side, those who consider that the agreed points are sufficient and the important thing is to move forward so that the reform is approved as soon as possible. On the other, those who believe that the most harmful aspects of the norm have not been modified. Thus, one and the other had transferred —by way of pressure— that today that the reform could blow up. Nothing has exploded.
After an hour of session, the parties have decided to vote on whether to advance the reform. It has been the vote of ERC, one of the most belligerent groups for the red lines that the PSOE has marked, which has allowed the report to go to the Interior Commission on the same day that the agreement between the Government and the PSC for budgets in Catalonia. Junts and EH Bildu, also promoters of the reform, have voted together with the Popular Party, Ciudadanos and Vox: 19 votes in favor compared to 17 to make the text decline.
From ERC they assure that, although they have allowed with their vote to close the phase of meetings behind closed doors, the reform has not been agreed and the process in which progress has been made “does not mean that an agreement has been reached”. For their part, the parties that make up the Government have stressed that the points already agreed allow us to speak of a “new citizen security law” that guarantees the “balance” between freedoms such as the right to demonstrate and legal security in the work of the agents of the State Security Forces and Bodies.
