By Euro Weekly News Media • Published: 05 Nov 2015 • 17:34
JUST 24 hours after the Spanish High Court dealt Marbella a blow by cancelling its latest PGOU (Plan General de Ordenacion Urbana), effectively making 16,500 buildings legalised by the plan once again illegal, the Costa del Sol has had a second, rather bizarre, blow from the same source.
The Dispute Tribunal has declared the Western Costa del Sol’s POT Land Management Plan null and void for two reasons, one being that the Junta de Andalucia regional government, it decided, broke one of its own laws when it approved the POT.
In 2003, in an aim to crack down on gender and equal rights matters, the Junta pushed through a law demanding that all draft laws and regulations presented include a gender impact report.
Yet upon passing the POT in 2006, the High Court found, it failed to provide one of these reports.
Although the Junta argued that as the land management plan included no precepts that could affect equality, the failure to produce the gender impact report could only be considered to be an irregularity and should not invalidate the entire document.
The court has based its decision on a decree passed by the Andalucian government in February 2012 establishing that these reports had to be created regardless of whether they were relevant or not.
If the matter had no positive or negative effect on equal opportunities for men or women, the decree stated, this should be noted on the report.
Although this decree came years after the POT was approved, the high court decided it proved that the Junta had effectively broken its own law on the matter.
The second reason to declare the POT null and void arose from an appeal from La Barca NV, SA, a company that appealed against the POT in the planning stages but failed to receive any response from the Junta.
Although the Andalucian High Court rejected the company’s case in 2012, the high court has now found in its favour, stressing that part of proceedings to bring in this type of regulation is to provide adequate information to the public and respond to any claims or queries.
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Not much different than the direction most of this country has been going in for the last decade… backwards, the same as the politicians that run things here! Not meaning anything against the Spanish politicians but this country, especially the Mediterranean coast should be booming and the main reason it is not are Spanish politicians from town halls through local government right up to central government, greedy, selfish and politically clueless.
Itôs past ridiculous. Especially given the sorry state of the legal system in this country. Is there never an ounce of common sense used in these matters? Pity Guy Fawkes wasnôt Spanish and succesful……
Mike is quite correct. The Med coast of Spain should be booming, but the Spanish Ayuntamientos and Gobierno are doing their best to place more hurdles in the way and are making it much harder for any foreigner to be resident here, and to buy property here. Even holidaymakers complain about certain things and laugh at the antics of politicians here sometimes. It’s almost as though the Spanish Parliament are going backwards so fast that they will eventually reach the Franco era again.
i can agree with that comment
I actually think Franco did more for Spain than the current politicians, they and their previous liked to run Franco down as he was a dictator and they ‘current politicians’ where giving Spain democracy… right but Franco built a lot of the infrastructure for Spain that it needed to take it into the tourist boom and democracy that pushed the country forward such as hydro electric, building reservoirs that if Spain didn’t have, it would not have coped with tourism, he also prepared it for a monarch… now these things might not seem important to some people compared to other things they prefer to report that he did that many didn’t like (mostly those who where not even born when he was alive but lets not go there!) but those where major steps for a country such as Spain as it was 45 years ago, those things where a massive amount more than the current excuses for politicians have done for this country in the last 10 to 15 years… and Rajoy’s ‘Gag law’… at least Franco actually did good things for Spain and it’s people… even though he had his own gag law!Sometimes I wonder if it might be a better place have he come back 😉
When I read of the decision reached by the high court on the PGOU I was dumbfounded. I assume they must realise what is now going to happen along the Costa de Sol directly because of their edict. In a reviving economy, particularly in the Tourist sector, they have all but destroyed a confidence that potential purchasers of property purchasers had, and any current and future developers, marketeers, Planers, and indeed Town Halls had.They may be technically correct, but fact that this decision has the potential to set the Costa deL Sol back 5 years in its recovery, when a behind the scene set of corrective measures should have been imposed on the errant administrations to resolve the issue, before the hundreds of millions of euros damage, and the hardship that thousands of employees will have to face became irretrievable.Then to make matters worse, to void the POT on, something so flimsy as a lapse on gender reporting,is nothing short of demonstrating a vendetta against a previous administration.Or perhaps they are so far removed from real life, that they DONT realise..
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