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The new legislative text published on 28 May by the Balearic Government modified more than 50 regulations with grave consequences for environmental values. It is a new reason for the protest rally on Saturday 8 June at 19.30 in the Plaza Biosfera de Maó.

GOB will be involved in new rural legislation attempts and is studying what legal actions could be taken across the islands

The Decree-Law that has just been published does not only try to award illegal works in rural land or put parking places for saturated beaches – it also modifies the Farming Law, the Conservation Law, the law of the Reserve of the Biosphere of Menorca, the Rural land law, the Tourism law, the Ports of the Balearic Islands law, the Climate Change law, the Hunting and Fishing law, the law on strategic industrial projects, the attribution of powers to the councils in urban planning and habitability, the law of mining, the Town Planning Act, the Laws of Urbanisation and Roads.

Environmental values, more unprotected

This generates a total lack of defence for the principles of protection related to the regulatory body, leaving all the land and sectoral planning without effective coherence, and without evaluating the consequences and brutal impacts this deregulation will have on resources and land reality. It is open to a ban on investment and devastating to unchecked resources. It is without precedent that is especially grave at the time of such sensitivity against tourist overcrowding.

GOB believes that the range of this disproportionate deregulation cannot be made by such an undemocratic mechanism as a decree-law that comes into force only by a decision of the Governing Council. This will be one of the main reasons to be analysed for legal action taken by GOB.

Town Councils, UNESCO and Constitutional Tribunal

The Decree-Law allows large constructions in rural land, eliminates the Commssion of the Environment, and modifies some of the most important aspects of the Law of Welfare for Future Generations (approved by popular initiative).

GOB believes that the range of the consequences of the decree, the impact on the principles of equality, security and environmental protection, and the way in which the decree law is imposed, are not welcome and we are analysing all the ways to demand a precautionary suspension of this ruling and its effects and to challenge it before the Constitutional Tribunal.

Letters are being sent to all the Town Councils for GOB to appear in Court as an interested party concerning all the legalization files intended to be covered by the urban planning amnesty.

The fact that legalization procedures are made in the Town Councils, without any external intervention, without going through any public disclosure, urban planning or heritage commissions of the Consell Insular (Island Governing Council), without having to receive any reports from any external body, makes these legalizations completely opaque. The revaluation of the property market implying millions of euros at stake will go as a prize to all those who have made illegalities out of the land of the Island.

More reasons for the Protest Rally in front of the Consell Insular

The decree-law shows that the declarations made by the Government and the Island Governing Council in favour of sustainability were empty words and only made as a strategic manoeuvre for controlling the discourse at times of public protests.

Today Menorca is more unprotected than ever and is the centre of real estate interest in the Mediterranean. It is more than ever necessary to go out and protest because our Governing Council has clearly made this political manoeuvre to be at the service of the territory’s predatory agents.