The environmental groups Salvemos Cala Mosca and Friends of the Southern Alicante Wetlands (AHSA) presented a common front to stop the urbanisation of Cala Mosca, the last remaining plot of open land on the Orihuela Costa, in the courts. To this end they have reached a collaboration agreement between both organisations to articulate a legal response to what they consider a serious and irreversible environmental attack against the coastline and biodiversity of the Vega Baja region.
The presentation of appeals and complaints before the courts, as well as the appearance in judicial proceedings by environmental groups, has often been restricted by the material impossibility of meeting the expenses generated by these legal actions and even by the sentence to the payment of legal costs, as occurred in 2006 when AHSA and Ecologistas en Acción were ordered to pay part of the costs of the lawsuit against the contamination of the Segura River. For several years now, the Spanish courts have recognised the legitimate right of non-profit ecological and environmental groups to benefit from free justice, but not without some resistance that was settled with several Supreme Court rulings in that regard.
Salvemos Cala Mosca began a successful fundraising campaign a few months ago to cover the costs of hiring a lawyer to present a contentious appeal against the approval of the Cala Mosca urbanisation project, despite the expenses derived from a process legal proceedings against an urban project are outside the possibilities of a modest environmental group, which is why it was essential to obtain the so-called free legal assistance that includes exemption from the payment of court fees as well as the deposits necessary for filing appeals or assistance of free expert opinion among other services.
Among the requirements to be a beneficiary of the right to so-called free justice, similar but not exactly the same as what we might consider to be “legal aid”, is that the requesting association be more than two years old, a condition that Salvemos Cala Mosca did not meet. This is where AHSA comes into play, a veteran environmental group that for years has been opposing, through writings and allegations, the processing of the Cala Mosca urbanisation project, requesting the right to free justice and presenting an appeal before the Administrative Litigation Court in Elche.
Recently, the Alicante Free Justice Commission has notified AHSA that it recognises its right to free legal assistance for the presentation of the appeal against the Cala Mosca urbanisation, guaranteeing the possibility of continuing the legal actions undertaken. Both organisations consider this type of short-term policies to be irresponsible in an area that lacks the basic services required by a volume of population and built area such as that which exists in Orihuela Costa. On the other hand, they insist on the complete nonsense of the destruction of one of the few coastal spaces free of cement in the south of the Vega Baja and consider it completely suicidal, in times of global boiling and mass extinction of species.
AHSA and Salvemos Cala Mosca remain hopeful in this judicial process, since the actions of both the Orihuela City Council and the Generalitat Valenciana have been disappointment after disappointment, despite the demonstrations and writings presented in the long struggle around Cala Mosca for keeping it virgin and natural as a paradise of species and paradigm in the protection of the coastline.
