The Almeria City Council will not collect the fines it imposed during the state of alarm

The Almeria City Council will not collect the fines it imposed during the first state of alarm, according to Ramon Fernandez-Pacheco, the mayor of Almeria.

The Almeria mayor announced on Monday, August 9, that the City Council does not plan to collect fines that local police officers imposed during the first state of alarm. The state of alarm in Spain began on March 18 in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In July the Constitutional Court decided that the state of alarm confinement was unconstitutional. This included limiting people’s mobility in public spaces and the Ministry of Health’s ability to modify or extend the measures on commercial activity.

“If the state of alarm was illegal, it makes little sense for us to charge for infringing something that in theory should not have occurred, at least not in those terms”, said the mayor of Almeria.

He also explained that processes will be put in place to ensure that any fines that have already gone through will also be reversed.

So far the Almeria City Council do not know how many fines exactly were imposed during the state of alarm which ended on June 21. This includes people skipping confinement borders and opening businesses at times when there was supposed to be closed

As reported La Noncion, “During the first few weeks of the closure alone, between 14 March and 6 April, officers issued 863 reports for breaching the closure with fines ranging from 300 to 600,000 euros, during which time the same person was fined four times.”

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