Thank you Ruth for identifying this.
I have just posted the following on Mr Lidington's blog
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" I have to agree with Keith and support his petition wholeheartedly. For many years now we have witnessed all manner of real estate, bank and legal abuse in Spain, from
- Developers who have significantly reneged on their contracts
- Lawyers who have failed in their responsibilities to ensure details relating to Bank Guarantees were correctly identified within off plan purchase contracts, (according to law 57/68, introduced to protect the consumer)
- Banks who have refused to provide or honour Bank Guarantees
- Significant delays within the justice administration system which have compromised the application of law (clients win their first instance cases but the developer appeals and major judicial delays result in clients stuck in the system for years while they await a judicial resolution or the issue of preliminary enforcement orders, and in the interim the purchaser runs the significant risk of the developer either asset stripping or going into administration/ declaring insolvency).
- Corruption where developers worked hand in hand with lawyers to the detriment of the purchaser, or town hall officials in league with developers who ignored higher planning regulations and compromised those who had their homes subsequently declared illegal, (even though they went through all the correct procedures). Innocent home owners like the Priors have been treated as pawns between warring factions of regional and local politicians with no compensation structure in place. And how many more live under this threat of demolition?
And so it goes on….
When petitioners organised themselves and provided evidence to substantiate their claims via valid petitions to the EU and their government, they were informed that
“The Commission's comments
Under the Treaty establishing the European Community and the Treaty on European Union, the Commission does not have any general powers to intervene in individual cases relating to problems of general administration of justice, inefficiency of the judicial system and particular issues such as described in the petition, unless there is a link to Community law.
As Community law stands at present, there is no EC legislation regulating the legal requirements relating to the granting of licences to build or the respective remedies against national authorities in case of misuse of public powers. Nor is there Community law concerning the purchase of private property, different from time-share (Directive 94//47/EC),
the recovery of bank deposits, the remedies against building contractors in breach of contract, or the length of national court proceedings. Such issues are regulated by national law.
Conclusion
In the absence of an infringement of EC law, the European Commission has no competence to intervene. The petitioner should continue to seek redress through the competent judicial authorities in Spain invoking the non respect of Article 6 of the ECHR. “
The key wording here is competent judicial authorities.
Well I would like to ask, what action can the EU take if a member state’s judicial authorities have been proven to be incompetent, as is the obvious case in Spain?
As things stand now the Spanish justice system is compromising thousands of British EU citizens by their failure to provide any form of timescale constraints on legal processes, and they are therefore failing in their duty to ensure that the laws of the land are correctly administered.
Just how bad do things have to get before the EU parliament wakes up to the devastating effects of all too many innocent people’s life savings being compromised, or their homes being demolished while political games are being played out and/or a government refuses to recognise the major deficiencies and incompetence that is crippling their justice system, not to mention the abusive tactics of the Banks .
NO THE EU PARLIAMENT HAS A DUTY TO RESPOND EFFECTIVELY TO THESE INJUSTICES.
Surely this has to be brought to the attention of our new leaders and EU MEPs immediately. We cannot afford to await Spanish internal reform, as the timescales to Spain's self correction will prove far too late for many caught up in this nightmare scenario. We should be pushing, no I will rephrase that, we should be demanding that a compensation fund (taken from Spain’s EU allocation as Margrete Auken has proposed in her report) be made immediately available until such time as these abuses are addressed by the Spanish government and their legal fraternity.
If you need any further evidence may I suggest you read the following blog
Please Mr Lidington will you do all that you can to address these injustices that are affecting so many innocent people’s lives."
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