2 june 2016

The OL 5/2010 from 22 June and updated by the Royal Decree 840/2011, from 17 June, modified the Organic Law 10/1995, from 23 November, at the Penal Code.   This modification stablishes new measures to execute community service penalties, Additionally, it also includes modifications in the suspension of operations related to custodial sentences and to the substitution of penalties.

This new law modifies the one created fifteen years ago, and responds to new types of criminality, such as those derived from new technologies, and updates sentences about mobbing. It also responds to the social demand of an individualised treatment for criminals responsible for sexual and terrorism crimes, as well as a greater protection of minors against sexual crimes. The law of 2010 takes into account what this type of crimes are for the public opinion and legislates in order to apply more sever punishments for the integral protection against gender violence.

The possibility of serving the sentence of community service through workshops, training programmes or programmes for re-education was introduced in the Organic Law 5/2010: this criminal sanction is one of the most applied legal consequences in criminal offences relating to gender violence. Other of the measures introduced by this law is the permanent location: the person with a sentence of deprivation of liberty under six months can change it for a continuous location sentence, with the specific prohibition of not approaching the victims.

The Constitution notes the need of rehabilitation: the sentence, thanks to this law, can also be complemented with therapeutic and training courses but they can never become a substitute of the criminal sanction. That is, the Law 5/2010 provides measures that point towards the rehabilitation from a realistic and inclusive perspective of penal type. It can complement the sentence applied for gender-based violence crimes but in no case it can replace the criminal sanction the batterer has.

The concept of damage repairs is what this law application seeks for. In The Execution of the Labours to the Benefit of the Community for Gender-Based Violence, Dr Elena Martínez García and Dr Juan Carlos Vegas Aguilar analyse a series of implementation cases of the Organic Law 5/2010 and let readers to judge the efficiency or not of the law.