Stories – Spain: Access to justice

For Rafael Cid, a Spanish human rights defender, the desire to help people was always there, it just took time to discover how best to dedicate his professional life to social change. After leaving his first law firm job, Rafael traveled to Kenya to work with children and families with HIV. He was struck that the local legal framework wasn’t preventing violence within families. Upon returning to Spain, he recognised that you don’t need to travel abroad to make a difference, there’s plenty of work to do at home. And as a lawyer, he can combine his profession with his passion for helping vulnerable people, and make a difference locally. 

“I started to realise I could re-orientate my career and try to give people proper access to justice. Even though there’s access to free counseling and legal representation, it doesn’t always work well. I thought, okay, maybe I can really help here.”

Rafael began successfully litigating migrant and asylum cases in Spanish courts, which he credits to his extensive procedural law knowledge. After a while, Rafael realized that he could do more than take cases to court — he can help bring about social change. Inspired by the work of strategic litigators around Europe, Rafael recognized they needed something similar in Spain. So he co-founded Gentium with the mission of improving access to justice for vulnerable groups.

Gentium began to partner with groups such as Fundación Raíces to identify the problems they were seeing on the ground, and then strategise and define the legal action to create sustainable change beyond individual cases. This requires finding and connecting the right people. “Creating these connections is really what we’re doing,” Rafael emphasises. “We’re finding the right people, uniting academia with lawyers and CSOs with on-the-ground knowledge. All with this vision that a single case is insufficient — the objective is change and so we need to figure out how to integrate legal knowledge to best achieve this change.”

One of Rafael’s biggest concerns right now is close to home. Cañada Real, Europe’s largest shanty town, is just 12km from the center of Madrid. “There’s no proper record of the population,” Rafael explains, “but around 4,500 people, including 2,000 children, live there and have been without electricity for more than two years.” The name Cañada Real means “cattle road” — it’s one long street lined, at first, with houses, but as you enter the last two sectors, the living conditions decline significantly.

“I was not prepared to see a shanty town so close to the city center of Madrid. Cañada Real is like a favela — even worse, really. You see old people who have been living there for 40 or 50 years. Spanish citizens, including Roma, and migrants. Women, children, and families. The worst living conditions you can imagine.”

They are still without electricity. So it’s not a success story, yet. Rafael and his colleagues coordinated the first collective complaint against Spain after the ratification of the European Social Charter of Social Rights, and based on this complaint they have pushed at the European Parliament to make their voices heard and put pressure on the Spanish government to address the situation. “The case has Spanish ministers try to give a proper explanation of what is happening. Without this pressure from EU institutions, the Spanish government wouldn’t have to respond.”

Rafael believes the EU has done a good job at creating EU-wide protection for fundamental rights in the Charter, “but it needs to go much farther.” He hopes the EU will increase funding to help human rights defenders so they can use the law even more effectively to protect human rights. Rafael emphasizes that it’s not only about resources, it’s also about making the EU a reference standard for human rights around the world. 

This is an exciting time, according to Rafael. It’s a fragile and turbulent political moment, not just in Spain but worldwide. And while he has some fears regarding increased attempts to restrict vulnerable people’s freedoms, he’s optimistic.

“I’m hopeful that now, in this political climate, we can reconnect society with what is really important and what unites us — human rights.”

Rafael Cid is Co-Founder and Legal Director of Gentium, a Spanish civil society organisation, whose goal is to improve access to justice for victims of human rights violations belonging to vulnerable groups. He works on cases related to the protection of the rights of children, Roma people, migrants and refugees. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Deusto, where he teaches human rights strategic litigation.