A Pulitzer prize-winning photographer in Spain has been fined nearly €1,000 under the country’s “gag law” for an incident in which police blocked his attempts to take pictures of refugees.
Javier Bauluz said he received news of the €960 fine this week, more than a year after a confrontation with police while he was documenting the arrival of thousands of migrants and refugees in the Canary Islands. At the time, police warned Bauluz he would be fined for “disrespecting an agent” and “refusing to identify himself”, despite the photographer’s insistence that he had handed over his identification.
The fine was delivered by post and did not explain what he had done wrong, Bauluz said.
The encounter took place in Arguineguín, a small town on the island of Gran Canaria where Bauluz had spent months capturing the story of some of the 20,000 people who had arrived after risking one of Europe’s deadliest crossings.
Bauluz sought to capture the cramped conditions some people were forced to live in – later described by one judge as “deplorable” – on the town’s scorching, rat-infested dock. Police regularly blocked him and other journalists from approaching.
“They put us so far away that you couldn’t tell if they were men or women or if they were crying or smiling,” said Bauluz. “The only thing you can do from that distance is take the kind of photos that feed into xenophobia, showing masses of unidentifiable people.”
One morning in November 2020, Bauluz arrived before police had cordoned off the area and began taking photographs as a rescue vessel arrived with people onboard. He was soon approached by two officers.
A video of the encounter appears to show one of the officers grabbing Bauluz by the arm amid demands to leave the site. The confrontation continues for nearly two minutes, during which one of the officers accuses Bauluz of insulting him and threatens to fine him under the so-called gag law.
Spain’s 2015 public security law, dubbed the gag law, has long been criticised by UN experts, human rights groups and journalists. Passed by the conservative People’s party, the public security legislation allows authorities to fine journalists and media organisations for distributing unauthorised images of police. It also sets strict limits on when and where protests can be held, and allows the expulsion of people who enter Spain’s two northern African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla irregularly.
The law has ensnared journalists, artists and even a woman who posted a photo of a police car parked illegally in a bay reserved for people with disabilities.
“What the gag law does is take things that used to be felonies and converts them into administrative infractions. As if you were a car,” said Bauluz, who in 1995 was part of a team awarded the Pulitzer prize for their work in Rwanda. “Cars don’t have the right to defend themselves, or to a trial or to call lawyers or witnesses. But we’re human beings who supposedly live in a democracy, no?”
Despite longstanding promises to ditch the law, Spain’s socialist-led coalition has limited its efforts to the sluggish process of trying to change the law.
On Monday, Amnesty International in Spain threw their support behind Bauluz, describing the gag law as a “serious threat” to freedom of expression and freedom of information. “The work of journalists like Javier Bauluz is crucial to documenting rights violations,” it said on Twitter.
Bauluz, who recently published a book containing his photos from the Canary Islands, summed up the fines as a “symptom” of the legislation. “This is a case where there is video of the confrontation and it happened to a somewhat known journalist,” he added. “But this is happening in Melilla, in Ceuta, in protests and other places.”
