Abstract

This study analyzes the Spanish law 4/2015 on the protection of public security to verify the concerns of several democratic commissions, human rights organizations, and journalists that the law unjustly restricts the civil liberties of the Spanish public. Specifically, this study aims to quantify how this piece of legislation can be misinterpreted and misapplied in penal cases to the detriment of the freedom of speech. To achieve this, a critical discourse analysis of the legislation was carried out to identify key words tied to the base jurisprudential concepts of the law, namely, public security and public order. Contextualized based on the recommendations made by other organizations such as the Venice Commission sponsored by the Council of Europe and other independent bodies, this research reveals significant inefficacies in the structure of the law and its application. To accurately describe these inefficacies and contextualize them in terms of public interactions with the court and the context of their development and application, this study is ordered as follows. Chapter 1 focuses on the law itself, the history and context of its development and adaptation, its aims, and its consequences in the legal system. Chapter 2 reviews the official opinions of several legislative watchdog groups and human rights organizations, the popular reaction to the law’s implementation in Spanish media, the most controversial cases related to the legislation, and their outcomes for the parties involved and the Spanish public at large. Chapter 3 describes the process of critical discourse analysis of the law itself, the articles recommended for review by jurisprudential entities, and how the data collection process relates to potential issues in the structure of the legislation. Chapter 4 consolidates these findings in the context of the legislation and reviews areas in which the legislation does exhibit problematic design. These findings are then discussed in light jurisprudential theory and the current state of democracy in the European Union. The linguistic indeterminacy present primarily in the preamble of the legislation relate directly to unnecessarily vague regulations prominent in chapter 5 of the legislation. A failure to establish necessary details in the preamble of the law subjects these regulations a wide range of interpretation by Spanish authorities, producing an unjustified risk to free expression in Spain.

Advisor

Balam, Osmer

Second Advisor

Holt, Katherine

Department

History; Spanish

Disciplines

Applied Linguistics | Discourse and Text Linguistics | European History | Human Rights Law | Legal | Legal Theory | Political History | Spanish Linguistics | Technical and Professional Writing

Keywords

vagueness, jurisprudence, indeterminacy, critical discourse analysis, ambiguity, human rights, expression, fundamental rights, public space, protest

Publication Date

2022

Degree Granted

Bachelor of Arts

Document Type

Senior Independent Study Thesis

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© Copyright 2022 Jacob Ray Shelton