Spain

General Overview

The area of freedom of expression records setbacks in the Spanish case during the period under analysis. Episodes of police repression of protest and the imprisonment of young antifascists reveal the persistence of a restrictive legal framework — inherited from the 2015 Citizen Security Law, known as the “Gag Law” — that the Sánchez government has not managed to reverse during its tenure. This tension between the executive’s progressive agenda and the continued existence of repressive legal tools is one of the most characteristic and problematic features of the Spanish case in this period.

Repression of Protest: Antifascists and Pro-Palestinian Demonstrators

In October 2024, nine people were detained and several injured during a police crackdown on a pro-Palestinian protest in Santiago de Compostela. The detained youths were charged with public disorder and assault on authority — legal categories that the Gag Law notably expanded, facilitating their use against peaceful demonstrators. In April 2025, four young antifascists from Zaragoza were imprisoned for their participation in protests against the far right, in a case that generated mobilization from the left and from human rights organizations, who characterized it as the criminalization of antifascism.

The persistence of these episodes under a self-described progressive government points to a structural contradiction: the Sánchez executive has driven significant advances in other rights, but has been unable — or has failed to gather the necessary parliamentary votes — to modify the legal framework that enables the repression of protest. The Gag Law remains a tool available to the security forces, regardless of the national government’s political color.

Resistance: Antifascist Mobilization

Facing the advance of the far right, in November 2024 the Madrid Antifascist Coordinating Body convened a demonstration that brought together thousands of people, as part of a cycle of civil society mobilizations in Spain against the growth of Vox and the positions of the radical right. This mobilization is part of a tradition of social response to far-right advances that, in the Spanish case, has historical roots associated with the memory of Francoism.

General Overview

The area of sexual and reproductive rights in Spain shows a positive balance in terms of executive measures and Constitutional Court rulings, contrasted with implementation deficits that affect the effective exercise of those rights across much of the territory. The Sánchez government accumulated advances during the period in LGBTIQ+ rights, in protection against gender-based violence, and in safeguarding the right to abortion. At the same time, the normative violations documented by human rights organizations reveal that the progressive agenda of the central executive encounters resistance in regional administrations and health institutions.

The Right to Abortion and LGBTIQ+ Rights

In September 2024, the Constitutional Court dismissed the unconstitutionality appeals filed by the PP and Vox against the 2023 Abortion Law reform, securing the right of 16- and 17-year-olds to have abortions without parental permission and eliminating the mandatory reflection period. This ruling closed a multi-year legal battle and consolidated a normative framework that the right-wing opposition had sought to reverse. In June 2024, the government filed unconstitutionality appeals against reforms to the Trans and LGBTI laws of the Community of Madrid, challenging articles involving conversion therapies, the pathologization of trans minors, and the exclusion of LGBTI organizations as interested parties in criminal or administrative sanctioning proceedings. In September 2024, Royal Decree 1026/2024 came into force, stipulating that companies with more than 50 employees must have protocols against LGBTI discrimination.

Protection Against Gender-Based Violence: Normative Advances and Implementation Gaps

In July 2024, Spain voted in favor of Resolution A/HRC/56/L.25/Rev.1 on the elimination of discrimination against women and girls at the UN Human Rights Council. In February 2025, the government renewed the State Pact against gender-based violence with a larger budget for 24-hour crisis centers for victims of sexual violence. In March 2025, the Council of Ministers approved the draft Organic Law on measures regarding vicarious violence — violence exercised against children to harm their mother — criminalizing it as an autonomous offense with sentences of six months to three years in prison.

But beyond the progressive character of the law itself, public statements, and budget allocations to sustain public policies, effective access to rights was at times obstructed. In December 2024, an Amnesty International report noted that only five autonomous communities had implemented the conscientious objector registry for abortion provision — a mechanism included in the 2023 reform which, in the absence of such a registry, allows undeclared conscientious objection to obstruct access to abortion in the public health system in practice. The contextual fact accompanying this finding — that the majority of abortions in Spain take place in private institutions — points to a structural failing of the public health system in guaranteeing this right effectively.

General Overview

The area of labor rights records the highest number of advances in Spain during the period. The Sánchez government — with the Ministry of Labor headed by Yolanda Díaz and Sumar as coalition partner — deployed a labor reform agenda of considerable scope during the period: reduction of working hours, increase of the minimum wage, early retirement in jobs considered hazardous, and labor protection for persons with disabilities.

Reduction of Working Hours and Minimum Wage

In December 2024, the Ministry of Labor signed an agreement with the trade unions Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) and Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) to reduce the maximum working week from 40 to 37.5 hours without wage reduction, benefiting more than 12 million workers. The agreement includes mandatory digital time-tracking and reinforcement of the right to digital disconnection. In May 2025, the Council of Ministers presented the draft law to formalize this reduction in the legal framework, with time-tracking and the right to disconnect as its pillars. In February 2025, Royal Decree 87/2025 set the Minimum Interprofessional Wage (SMI) at 1,184 euros per month — 16,576 euros annually — an increase of 4.4% compared to 2024. Since the beginning of the Sánchez government, the SMI has accumulated an increase of more than 60%, up from 735.9 euros per month in 2018.

Early Retirement and Disability Protection

In May 2025, Royal Decree 1192/2024 implemented the early retirement reform for hazardous jobs — those with high exposure to risk or toxicity — lowering the retirement age in those sectors. In May 2025, Law 2/2025 harmonized Spanish legislation with European guidelines on disability, eliminating automatic dismissal due to permanent incapacity — a significant labor inclusion measure that protects workers with disabilities from dismissal.

Spain’s labor agenda for the period contrasts radically with those of Argentina and the United States, where far-right administrations actively dismantled labor protection mechanisms. The reduction of working hours without wage reduction advanced in Spain as a result of collective bargaining with the major trade unions.

General Overview

In this area, the Spanish government is advancing migrants’ rights from the executive branch, while the right and far right use the migration issue as a central axis of political mobilization, particularly at the regional level. The case of the migrant minors from the Canary Islands is the most representative episode of this dynamic during the period under analysis.

Advances by the Central Government: Regularization and Immigration Law Reform

The period records three significant advances in the rights of migrants. In April 2024, Congress approved — with 310 votes in favor and 33 against — a Popular Legislative Initiative backed by more than 600,000 signatures for the extraordinary regularization of 500,000 undocumented migrants, with the PP voting in favor. In November 2024, the government approved a new regulation of the Immigration Law providing for the regularization of 300,000 migrants per year, facilitating labor, educational, and family integration. In April 2025, Congress approved the reform of the Immigration Law to establish the mandatory distribution of migrant minors among autonomous communities when capacity exceeds 150% — a measure that the PP and Vox voted against.

The Instrumentalization of Migration: The Case of the Canary Islands Minors

In July 2024, Vox and PP dissolved coalition regional governments in at least one autonomous community after refusing to accept the 347 migrant minors who had arrived in the Canary Islands and whose distribution had been approved by Congress. This episode — which MIDA records as a setback because it involves the coordinated rejection of a measure to protect migrant minors and the collapse of governments over an anti-migration agenda — clearly illustrates the use of migration policy as an instrument of far-right positioning in Spain. The image of unaccompanied minors turned into political bargaining chips is one of the most eloquent indicators of the state of the migration issue in Spain.

Hate Speech: Relevant Context

As contextual data — not computable on the MIDA scale but significant for the diagnosis — the OBERAXE 2024 report documented 2,095 cases of racist, xenophobic, antisemitic, anti-Roma, and Islamophobic hate speech on social media, with North Africans being the most affected group (33.7% of cases) and Islamophobia the most frequent type of discourse (26.2%). The report also noted that officials from right-wing parties maintain these discourses in the public sphere. This persistence of hate speech in institutional political debate is an indicator of the climate within which the central government’s measures advancing migrants’ rights are situated.