Amnesty criticizes Spain's high record of evictions

The Spanish branch of the pressure group Amnesty International has issued a report which strongly criticizes the country's high record of evictions over the last seven years.

The study published on Tuesday shows there have been over 600,000 foreclosures on unpaid mortgages in Spain since the start of the economic crisis in 2008.

Esteban Beltran, director of Amnesty International Spain, told the El Pais newspaper on Wednesday that the government and many local authorities had to take responsibility for the crisis which has left so many people without homes.

"They have failed to meet all their international obligations with regard to the right to housing," he said, adding that "many authorities in Spain do not see housing as a human right but as a consumer asset. That is the essential root of this problem."

The report highlights that during the crisis government spending on subsidized low-cost, social housing dropped by over 50 percent and that social housing in Spain is just 1.1 percent of the total housing offer, compared with 32 percent in the Netherlands, 23 percent in Austria and 18 percent in Britain.

The situation has been made even worse by the policies of the former local council in Madrid which sold around 5,000 subsidized homes to investment funds, which then evicted the tenants.

"It would be difficult to find another human rights violation in Spain that is so extended and so invisible," said Beltran.

What makes the crisis even harder to understand is that as a result of the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, Spain has almost 30 percent of all of the empty houses in Europe, meaning people are being evicted and the homes they were evicted from then remain unoccupied and unsold. Endit