Urban planning and the risk of corruption

Under the slogan “Urban planning and the risk of corruption” the Agency for the Prevention and Fight against Fraud and Corruption of the Valencian Community commemorated on December 12, for the sixth time, the International Day of Fight against Corruption. A handful of chosen experts haveblended the very important role of citizens in the face of the phenomenon of urban corruption that, in an organized way, can and should, defend the public space of which we are all legitimate owners. They told us first-hand cases in which the fight against this scourge, despite being very hard, manages not only to reverse situations, but also to impose deserved sentences on those who grossly break the law for their own benefit. We also had the opportunity to learn about the legal vision of this unfortunate outrage against the common good. The legal good protected in urban corruption is the rational use of the environment as a limited natural resource and the adequacy of its use to the general interest. It is a community asset that does not have a specific owner, but its injury harms, to a greater or lesser extent, an entire community, sincecorruption scandals linked to urban planning have an enormous impact: economic, environmental and social. Among the causes of this phenomenon is the excessive discretion with which the City Councils have exercised and exercise the planning function. Urban planning agreements with individuals that give them a decisive role, real estate developments as a breeding ground, or civil servant technostructures, either by abandoning their functions, or actively serving as a transmission belt. The NGO Transparency International has pointed out that the area where corruption is highest in Spain is the local one. In these governments, especially in those located on the coast or in the vicinity of large cities, the qualification of urban land is the origin of the greatest cases of corruption. There are serious problems in at least four major areas: regulatory, bureaucratic, political and judicial. Hyper-regulation, or sometimes even tricky regulation, leaves the door open to arbitrariness, confusion and opacity, arrogance in decision-making and bad governance. The opening of activities and their operation without the granting of the appropriate licenses turning a blind eye or the excessive delay of authorizations in simple issues that should be resolved more effectively, are dysfunctions of the system that need to be corrected. Training and information, both of civil servants and of elected and unelected officials, are essential to prevent deviation from any behavior. The consequences are not trivial: possible crimes of prevarication, embezzlement of public funds, bribery, money laundering, criminal organization, influence peddling, illegal financing of political parties; or at the very least, administrative sanctions, which must be proportionate, dissuasive and effective; In addition to those consequences that, despite being intangible, have an even more harmful impact: reputational damage, the distrust of citizens in their institutions and those who govern them, the breakdown of the principle of equality and the disconnection of the common good and the general interest for the benefit of a few. We cannot deny the slowness of the judicial process, with cases that last an average of eight years; justice that is burdensome, and that cannot be afforded by the average citizen. In addition, often tangled: The matter turns out to be contentious when it was raised through criminal proceedings, or vice versa, if the criminal action was raised, the facts end up not conforming to the elements of the type, since not everything that is corruption is included in the Criminal Code. The Criminal Code would also require a thorough reform, as well as the procedural law. The complexity of these matters makes it impossible for them to be adequately addressed, with the scarce personal and material resources available. From our point of view, corruption crimes should be known to a specialized justice, as has happened with issues as particular and reprehensible as gender violence. It is curious that, although urbanity and urbanism, come from identical etymology, urbs-urbis in Latin, their most common current meanings are extremely distant. According to the RAE, urbanity is behavior consistent with good manners that demonstrates good manners and respect for others. However, according to the RAE, urbanism is the planning of the buildings and spaces of a city; the concentration and distribution of the population in cities. Given this and with all my respect to academics, it is preferable in this case to go to Wikipedia, which defines urbanism as the study of how the inhabitants of urban areas, towns and cities, interact with the built environment. The free encyclopedia adds the need for urban planning, focusing on the physical design and management of urban structures. As a whole, it studies the social, economic and environmental relations that take place within the urban phenomenon. We owethe term urbanism to the Catalan civil engineer Ildefonso Cerdá, in the late nineteenth century. A multifaceted man, he wrote the General Theory of Urbanization (1895), a pioneering work for which he is considered one of the founders of modern urbanism. His most important project was the urban reform of NINETEENTH-CENTURY Barcelona through the Cerdá Plan, with which he created the Eixample neighborhood. According to Cerdá, urban planning is the planning of the various places and environments in which material, sentimental and spiritual life takes place in all its manifestations, individual and collective, and includes both urban and rural settlements. The well-being of the population, resident or foreign, constitutes the ultimate object of urbanization. Cerdá said: “Here are the philosophical reasons that induced me and decided to contribute the word urbanization, not only to indicate any act that tends to group the building and regularize its operation in the group already formed, but also the set of principles, doctrines and rules that must be applied, so that the building and its grouping, Far from compressing, distorting and corrupting the physical, moral and intellectual faculties of social men, they serve both to promote their development and vigour and to increase individual well-being, the sum…

Embezzlement reform will give carte blanche to impunity

The forgotten of the TREBEP

Urban legends say that the most well-known and cited norm of all the legal systems in the world is the Fifth Amendment to the North American Constitution of 1791. The legal chronicles ( Swerdlow , 1982) collect as one of the historical moments of the use of the Fifth Amends the appearance of Blanche Posner, a retired teacher member of the WSP ( Women Strike for Peace ), who invoked the Fifth up to 44 times in the same hearing before the HUAC (Un-American Activities Committee). She, along with her companions, who also followed the same line of defense, added up to 145 invocations in the same process of the norm of the North American Constitution that allows witnesses to refuse to answer when the answers could incriminate them. In the legal practice of our national legal system, the legal precepts on which there is a consensus as the most used and cited are also two articles of the 1978 Constitution, 14 and 24. The first, regulating equality, and the second, effective judicial protection and the right to defense. On the opposite side of fame, in the place where oblivion lives, are the least used and unknown articles of our legal system, which apparently from the doctrine turn out to be articles 52 to 54 of the TREBEP. THE FORGOTTEN TREBEP: Articles 52 to 54 of the Consolidated Text of the Basic Statute of Public Employees. The code of conduct for public employees is largely forgotten in our administrative legal system, and it is worth noting that such abandonment has been due to both doctrine and the selection processes carried out by Public Administrations, as well as (sometimes) training that is given to public employees once they enter the public service, as, consequently, due to its lack of application, due to the jurisprudence that emanates from Courts and Tribunals. The regulation of the code of conduct is found, to the surprise of many public employees who are unaware of this issue, included with the force of law in articles 52 to 54 of Chapter VI of Title III of Royal Legislative Decree 5/2015, of October 30, by which the consolidated text of the Law of the Basic Statute of the Public Employee is approved. The TREBEP establishes the regulation of the code of conduct for public employees (art. 52), detailing the ethical principles that must be respected (art. 53) as well as the principles of conduct to which they are subject (art. 54). Below we will analyze and justify in this text the affirmation that the regulatory articles of the code of conduct for public employees are the great forgotten of our public legal system, having to anticipate from this moment that part of the doctrine has already been pointing to this conclusion, although without detailing and extending it, a reason that drives and justifies this work, and in this sense we have to endorse the forceful conclusion that reminds us that “the TREBEP Code of Conduct, applicable to public employees, has passed without pain or glory, as a perfect stranger” (Jiménez Asensio, 2020). 1. The doctrine: late administrative ethics and doubts about ethical codes. Concerns for modernization and reform of the public function in our legal system have fundamentally revolved around bureaucratic, organizational, and control aspects (Irurzun Montoro, 2010). Thus, the concern of the legislator, and of a large part of the doctrine, was focused on the study of electronic administration, and very specifically on the integration of new technologies in the classic institutions of our administrative law, the study of ethics within the framework of the Administration. It will not be until the first decade of the 21st century when the well-known and abundant cases of corruption produced in the framework of political activity -and in a related way in the Public Administrations themselves- have given rise to doctrinal reflections that would culminate in the regulation of behaviors. ethics of public activity. From this moment, a doctrinal concern for the behavior and ethical and moral qualities of public employees will be strengthened. The doctrine has been using indistinctly, for this figure unknown up to now in our public law, the denominations of public ethics or political ethics (Villoria Medineta , 2007), seeming in our opinion more accurate the denomination of administrative ethics (Gracia Romero & Latorre Villa, 2007). The doctrinal study of administrative ethics is based on two main pillars; on the one hand, that branch of knowledge that addresses and pursues the explanation of the ethics of the public organization itself; On the other hand, the second approach to administrative ethics deals with the study of the ethics of the personnel at the service of the Administration itself. The ethics of public employees, in which the code of conduct is integrated, can also be analyzed from two conceptual prisms: the negative and the positive (Carro Fernández-Valmayor, 2010). The negative approach addresses the construction of a limiting ethic, that is, one that seeks to avoid fraudulent or corrupt behavior. Positive or extensive ethics, on the contrary, seeks, in contrast, an improvement or passion for the sense of public service, fleeing from the repression of behaviors to seek the promotion of values. 2. The legal effectiveness of the codes of conduct and their application by the Courts and Tribunals. The problem of the legal effectiveness of articles 52 to 54 of the TREBEP regulating the code of conduct, despite its undoubted inclusion in a legal norm, arises from the moment the Basic Statute of Public Employees was approved in the year 2007, and this because already in that statement of reasons the legislator, after pointing out the innovation that the configuration of “an authentic code of conduct” implied in our legal system, immediately specified immediately that it was included in the Statute with ” a pedagogical and guiding purpose”. The dogmatic difficulty that arises from the statement of reasons itself is accentuated by the literal wording of article 52 in fine, which establishes that “The principles and rules…