[vdaea]

That's not true at least in Spain. There's "In flagrante delicto" which means if the police suspects something going on they can kick your door down.

It was used many times during the pandemic: when they suspected you were having too many people over at home, they acted. Unconstitutionally, mind you.

The EU is not the utopia many think it is.

[martimarkov]

You’d need to define “unconstitutionally” as it seems if they have the right then it is constitutional

[vdaea]

The constitutional court of Spain ruled the state of alarm (a kind of state of emergency) that was used to prohibit gatherings during the pandemic was unconstitutional. But by then the damage was made of course.

[denton-scratch]

The constitutional court of Spain is an ultra-rightwing joke. Imprisoning Catalan nationalist politicians for calling for independence brought that court into disrepute.

I'm not keen on written constitutions, or constitutional courts <cough US Supremes>.

[vdaea]

Errr, that's not exactly what they did, as well as you know :-)

In any case I hope we can agree that it's good that they said that restricting our constitutional right to free movement was illegal, even if it had no consequences for those who violated our basic rights so blatantly.

[denton-scratch]

If I'm wrong about the constitutional court sentencing Catalan nationalist politicians to prison, that's not something I know; feel free to correct me.

I don't know what that has to do with free movement, nor how that's related to the imprisoned politicians.

FWIW, I don't accept the notion of "human rights" - there are in reality only those privileges that are actually granted. I would like it if there were some kind of universally-accepted set of rights; but only if they are congruent with my own views about what "rights" should look like.

[vdaea]

They did more than just "calling for independence". Use your search engine of choice to find out what they did.

And this was not a case of a violation of "human rights", in which I also do not believe. During the pandemic, there was a flagrant violation of our constitutional rights, among them, the right to free movement (which very roughly means, as a Spanish citizen, I can go anywhere in Spain, whenever I want) and free assembly. The constitutional court makes sure that the constitution has teeth, or so they should.

[hkt]

People think the EU is a utopia? I just think it is the best of a bad bunch