One person has died in Spain and another 29 have been seriously injured since the year 2000 in Spain due to the impact of riot gear used by police officers in street disturbances. This is the account carried out by Amnesty International in the report My Eye Burst, in which it demands the “ban” of rubber bullets and the “suspension of the use” of the ‘foam’ projectiles that replaced them. At a global level, the NGO calls for “strict controls on the use” and a “global treaty” to regulate the trade of this material.
ERC affirms that it will reject this Tuesday the reform of the gag law in Congress if there are no last-minute changes
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Amnesty International recalls that the National Police and the Civil Guard continue to use rubber bullets in Spain, uncontrollable projectiles that can reach up to 360 kilometers per hour. In the last two decades, these balls have caused the death of one person —the young Athletic Bilbao follower Iñigo Cabacas, in 2012— and have caused “serious injuries” to 24 others, four of whom ended up losing the vision of a eye as a result of the impact of this material, according to the report.
Autonomous police forces, such as the Ertzaintza and the Mossos d’Esquadra, replaced these rubber balls with ‘foam’ bullets as a result of the cases of Cabacas and Ester Quintana, who lost an eye to a rubber bullet in 2012 and launched a campaign who managed to ban them two years later in Catalonia. However, Amnesty International denounces that these precision viscoelastic projectiles “have also caused serious injuries and have been used to disperse crowds, something prohibited by international standards.” The organization has documented five cases of very serious injuries caused by its “misuse”: two people who lost an eye, two with severe head trauma, and another who lost a testicle.
In fact, the NGO considers that its use should be suspended to evaluate the protocols put into practice by the security forces and their technical specifications. For example, the report stresses that the Generalitat de Catalunya protocol authorizes the use of this type of ammunition at a distance of between 20 and 50 meters, despite the fact that its manufacturer recommends never firing it at less than 30 meters, since for below this distance the risk of serious injury increases exponentially.
The work includes the case of Africa, a young woman who was 19 years old when on February 16, 2021, during the protests in Barcelona for the imprisonment of rapper Pablo Hasel, she was hit by a ‘foam’ bullet from the Mossos for which he lost an eye. Two Mossos riot police shotgunners who were at the place and time of the injury when the regional police fired dozens of projectiles of that material to disperse the demonstration are being investigated for these events.
An expert report provided to this case concluded that the protocols of the Catalan police on this type of projectiles “do not conform” to the international standards of the United Nations, in addition to being too “ambiguous” in relation to their harmful potential. That study was carried out by two researchers from the Omega Center, a British organization specializing in the use of military, security and police technologies that has also produced this report together with Amnesty International.
The NGO’s work also includes the testimony of Eric Cuesta, the father of the young woman who lost an eye in those protests. “Now he is very afraid of any noise, with a firecracker or a horn he gets scared. She was a girl with a lot of social life, she went to a lot of demonstrations, and now she doesn’t want to go to a place where there are a lot of people. The impact for her has been brutal, she has even stopped studying. It cannot be that a person goes to a demonstration and returns without an eye”, she affirms.
Amnesty International’s report is published in full parliamentary debate on the gag law, which has had the use of rubber bullets one of the main obstacles to agreement between the groups. The text that has been worked on for more than two years in Congress is voted on Tuesday in the Interior Commission without there being an agreement for the moment to go ahead and follow the parliamentary process. One of the issues that has made negotiations difficult in recent months has been precisely the use of deterrent weapons. The process this Tuesday requires at least the abstention of the two pro-independence partners, but the Republicans have already advanced that, if there is no agreement in extremis, they will oppose it.
The two partners of the coalition government propose that the Ministry of the Interior prepare a study and that the competent authorities draw up a specific protocol on the police management of “demonstrations and meetings” that includes the use of force and riot equipment based on this report. . This protocol would regulate “the proper identification of the agents assigned to the units that use this type of material, selective isolation techniques for violent groups and accountability systems” with the aim of always using “the least harmful means.” Both ERC and EH Bildu reject this proposal, as they defend that rubber balls should be prohibited as riot control material.
The Amnesty International report also echoes the most relevant scientific study carried out on this matter, published in 2017 by The British Medical Journal. This work carried out a systematic review of the medical literature on the damage caused by rubber and plastic bullets and concluded that between 1990 and 2017 a total of 1,984 people were injured in conflicts in different parts of the world due to the impact of this material, from the that 53 died as a result of their injuries and 300 suffered permanent disability.
In conclusion, Amnesty International denounces that the national guidelines on the use of this type of projectile “almost never comply with international standards on the use of force, which establish that their use must be limited to situations of last resort when violent individuals represent an imminent threat of harm to other people”. The NGO reiterates that the police forces “regularly violate the regulations with impunity.”