Occupation and Legal Status
An international group of activists spent over a year searching in Barcelona for the best location to occupy a site and in December 2001 they moved onto the abandoned hospital. Can Masdeu became famous in April 2002, when over 100 national police came to evict 11 squatters. Using passive resistance over three days the squatters were able to hold off the police's efforts at forced removal. The squatters used a number of techniques to retain control of the space including, significantly, locking themselves to various precarious perches outside the building. This created a situation in which the police risked serious injury to themselves or to squatters in attempting to remove them. Some dangling occupiers locked themselves to the building, others balanced on a long seesaw, from which no single occupant could be removed without dropping the other. Many were suspended outside the building on frames and even a bathtub was used.
The police changed their initial strategy of forced removal with one of waiting for the squatters to get thirsty and hungry and come down. They waited for three days with growing local support and media attention. Hundreds of spectators came to see the occupation, many of them chanted slogans, and stopped traffic on the local highway. A Dutch solidarity organization organized an occupation of the Spanish Embassy in the Netherlands. After three days, the Barcelona judge overruling the case ordered the police to withdraw.
The judge's ruling specified that human rights and safety are more important than property rights.
There have been both civil and criminal cases brought against the occupants of Can Masdeu since 2002. Most of these cases have been lost by the community, but it continues to occupy the site, in part because the hospital which owns the facility does not have the financial capacity to renovate the structure. Further complicating the hospital's plans to provide a suitable reason for improving the Can Masdeu site is the fact that immediately next to it there is another larger abandoned institutional building, which could more easily be used than the more dilapidated older facility.
Read more about this topic: Can Masdeu
Famous quotes containing the words legal status, occupation, legal and/or status:
“In the course of the actual attainment of selfish endsan attainment conditioned in this way by universalitythere is formed a system of complete interdependence, wherein the livelihood, happiness, and legal status of one man is interwoven with the livelihood, happiness, and rights of all. On this system, individual happiness, etc. depend, and only in this connected system are they actualized and secured.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (17701831)
“Parenting, as an unpaid occupation outside the world of public power, entails lower status, less power, and less control of resources than paid work.”
—Nancy Chodorow, U.S. professor, and sociologist. The Reproduction of Mothering Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, ch. 2 (1978)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“His Majestys Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
—A.J. (Arthur James)