A Catalan separatist party with a handful of seats in the national parliament in Madrid has proposed a motion to make it easier to evict squatters, but the party’s low profile means the motion will go nowhere.

Catalonia has the biggest squatter problem in Spain by far with more than 40% of all reported cases so it is fitting that a Catalan party should propose a motion in the Spanish Congress of Deputies to make it possible to evict squatters within 48 hours, and empower neighbourhoods and town councils to take legal action against squatters. 

The motion was proposed by PDeCAT, a catalan nationalist party with a dominant history in Catalan politics and past life as power broker in Madrid. But these days the PDeCAT has just four seats in the national parliament in Madrid, and none in the regional parliament in Catalonia, so it’s hard to see where the political muscle will come from to take this motion forward into law.

The PDeCAT is proposing a change to the criminal justice law article 544 to allow evictions within 48 hours (2 days) if the occupiers can not produce a property deed or rental contract to justify their presence in a property.

They also propose changing the law for communities of owners (Ley de Propiedad Horizontal) to enable communities to start civil proceedings against squatters to get them evicted in cases where the owners do not start criminal proceedings against them. 

Finally the PDeCAT propose giving town councils powers to evict squatters if neither of the other two avenues are pursued because “squatting affects property rights but also the local community and town halls need instruments to deal with this,” explained Genis Boadella, PDeCAT deputy presenting the motion. 

The PDeCAT is a shadow of its former self, and self-destructed when it sacrificed itself and former leader Artur Más in the cause of Catalan independence from Spain. In doing so it handed considerable power to the hard-left CUP party of Catalonia that supports squatters 100%. So it’s not only fitting, but also ironic that the PDeCAT is proposing laws to clamp down on the squatter problem it helped to create.