The PSOE has asked for a precautionary suspension of the legalization of houses with prescribed urbanistic irregularities in rustic land in Ibiza. The Socialist Party has filed a lawsuit before the Court of Administrative Litigation against the agreement of the plenary session of the Consell Insular on June 28 and that facilitates the legalization of illegal homes or part of them to thousands of Ibizans.
That day, the Consell de Ibiza approved the application on the island of the “procedure for extraordinary legalization of buildings, constructions and facilities on rural land” provided for in the seventh additional provision of Decree Law 3/2024 of the Balearic Government and which has recently been validated as law with changes. The PSOE voted against and already in July announced that it would seek to stop the measure through the courts. Now, it has taken the step in court with the argument that the measure rewards offenders and will also have a serious environmental and urban impact on the island. According to the socialist spokeswoman in the Consell Insular, Elena López, “it is a rule designed to reward those who have done wrong. It rewards and encourages the commission of urban infractions. An effect calls to continue infringing, with that message given by the PP of ‘later I will fix it for you'”. López Bonet has described the measure as “absolutely arbitrary and scandalously clientelistic”. And he pointed out that on an island that “needs greater territorial protection, where there is a lack of resources such as water, which suffers from problems of overcrowding, urban amnesty will only increase all these problems”. For its part, the deputy Pilar Costa has detailed that one of the main legal arguments they have to conclude that the rule should be declared null and void is its “lack of motivation”. For Costa, it is a totally “arbitrary” decision, since “the decree law of the Balearic government enabled the Consell to apply or not the amnesty, and decides to do so, but without providing justification”. Costa has also exposed that the amnesty contravenes several autonomic regulations, such as the Urban Planning Law of the Balearic Islands and the Spatial Planning Guidelines, as well as basic state regulations, such as the Royal Legislative Decree 7/2015 (Land Law).
The demand
The PSOE has also requested the Court of Administrative Disputes to raise a question of unconstitutionality. In its submission, the PSOE emphasizes that the seventh additional provision of Decree Law 3/2024 leaves the decision to implement the extraordinary legalization procedure to the discretion of the island councils. But that the Consell de Ibiza has merely reproduced the content of the decree law “without providing any argument to support its necessity or usefulness for the island territory.” “Specifically, the need for motivation of administrative acts is regulated, in general, in art. 35 of Law 39/2015, of the common administrative procedure of public administrations,” the socialism has pointed out in its statement. The lawsuit also points out that the plenary agreement and the additional provision on which the measure is based contravene various autonomous regulations, such as the Urban Planning Law of the Balearic Islands and the Spatial Planning Guidelines, as well as basic state regulations, such as the Royal Legislative Decree 7/2015 (Land Law).“These laws establish strict criteria for the protection of rustic land, which the extraordinary legalization procedure ignores by allowing regularizations without complying with the applicable urban planning parameters. This violation puts at risk not only the integrity of the regulatory framework, but also legal certainty and the protection of collective interests,” says the PSOE, which describes the measure as a covert “urban amnesty”. At the same time, the demand of the socialist party stresses that the measure “could distort the environmental, landscape and cultural values of the island, generating an unjustified deprotection of its territory and favoring practices that violate the current urban planning regulations”.
