Law on Vagrants and Delinquents
부랑자·불량배법
A law on security measures against the “dangerous state” before any crime, passed unanimously by the Cortes of the Second Republic on 4 August 1933. It subjected vagrants, pimps, professional beggars and others to internment in labour establishments or restrictions on residence. The Franco regime added homosexuals to it by an amendment of 15 July 1954, and the Law on Social Danger and Rehabilitation replaced it in 1970.
In depth
The Law on Vagrants and Delinquents laid down not penalties but preventive security measures, allowing people deemed “dangerous” to be kept away, watched or interned until their danger had passed. When the first bill of Manuel Azaña’s government stalled, Mariano Ruiz-Funes and the Socialist penal scholar Luis Jiménez de Asúa wrote a new one, which the left-majority Cortes passed unanimously with the right’s consent; it was popularly called “la Gandula”. Its Article 2 listed ten “antisocial” categories, among them habitual vagrants, pimps, professional beggars, operators of forbidden games and habitual drunkards and drug addicts.
The regulations of 1935 greatly widened it, adding new categories and a clause allowing interpretation by analogy, and the law became an instrument against the poor. Labour camps were planned at Burgos, El Puerto de Santa María and on the island of Annobón in Spanish Guinea, the first opening at Alcalá de Henares in August 1934; Jiménez de Asúa himself came to oppose the law as it had been distorted. The Franco regime amended Articles 2 and 6 by a law of 15 July 1954 to cover homosexuals, describing the measures not as penalties but as security measures to correct “subjects fallen to the lowest moral level”. The amended text reads:
Article 2, no. 2. Homosexuals, pimps and procurers.
Article 6, no. 2. Homosexuals, pimps and procurers, professional beggars and those who live on the begging of others or exploit minors, the mentally ill or the disabled shall be subjected, to be served one after another, to the following measures:
a) Internment in a labour establishment or Agricultural Colony. Homosexuals subjected to this security measure must be interned in special institutions and, in all cases, in absolute separation from the others.
b) Prohibition of residence in a given place or territory and the obligation to declare their domicile.
c) Submission to the supervision of the Delegates.
«Artículo segundo.—Número segundo.—Los homosexuales, rufianes y proxenetas.»
«Artículo sexto.—Número segundo.—A los homosexuales, rufianes y proxenetas, a los mendigos profesionales y a los que vivan de la mendicidad ajena, exploten menores de edad, enfermos mentales o lisiados, se les aplicarán, para que las cumplan todas sucesivamente, las medidas siguientes:
a) Internado en un establecimiento de trabajo o Colonia Agrícola. Los homoxesuales [sic] sometidos a esta medida de seguridad deberán ser internados en Instituciones especiales y, en todo caso, con absoluta separación de los demás.
b) Prohibición de residir en determinado lugar o territorio y obligación de declarar su domicilio.
c) Sumisión a la vigilancia de los Delegados.»
After the 1954 amendment establishments such as the Tefía Agricultural Penitentiary Colony on Fuerteventura were set up to hold homosexuals, whose inmates suffered inhuman conditions and torture. In August 1970 the Law on Vagrants and Delinquents was replaced by the Law on Social Danger and Rehabilitation, which listed “those who perform acts of homosexuality” among the dangerous and provided for up to five years of “rehabilitation” in prisons or psychiatric institutions. The homosexuality clause was struck out by the Cortes in December 1978, after Franco’s death, in force from January 1979, and the Law on Social Danger itself was repealed only in 1995.