The Balearic Islands looked for a legal trick to pass Law 2/2021 of March 29, published in the Official Gazette, which surprised most of the community. This text, in Article 5, states that people over the age of six must wear a mask “on public roads, outdoors, and in any enclosed space for public use or accessible to the public.” After all, it lasted on the islands for several hours.

Legal Loophole

The Health Minister Patricia Gómez, after meeting with her counterparts in the Interterritorial Council, has announced that the Balearic Islands will keep the current restrictions. To this end, government lawyers looked for a legal loophole in the text that they could grasp and find.

“As indicated by the sanitary authorities.” It is part of a law approved by Congress that the Balearic Islands adhere to in order not to be forced to wear a mask in public places if social safety distance is respected. “The community legal service understands that our laws have not been violated”, Gomez explained yesterday.

Holy Week

So at least during the Holy Week there will be a decree approved in November which says that you will not need to protect yourself with a mask if you are walking alone, with a coexistence group, or if you keep your social distance with the rest of the people in the community, on the beach, in the swimming pools or in natural spaces, outside population centers.

The Health Minister hopes that this rule can be clarified at the interregional council on Wednesday next week, and hopes that outdoor use of the mask will not be compulsory if you manage to keep a safe distance. In this sense, he stated that the Law is not suspended, what is being done is interpreting it. He also specified that if the above rule keeps running, smoking in the street would not be possible.

The Interterritorial Council will form a working group with communities to deal with the change of the law, a decision will be made next week. If the rule needs to be changed later, “it will be,” said the councilor.

“The law has been published and we have made such an interpretation that we consider valid,” he said. Hence, we will additionally “sign and send an explanatory instruction to the security forces to make it clear that the regulations in force today will be ours”.

However, it should be remembered that until April 11, a different state instruction applies, which states that up to six people and two groups of cohabitants may participate in outdoor meetings.

Request from Formentera

Before announcing this, the Consell of Formentera made an attempt to stop this new law. President Alejandra Ferrer demanded to rethink the obligation to wear a mask on beaches. The island’s president assured that the standard published in the BOE was “inconsistent” with all the policy pursued so far when the autonomous communities and municipalities were “responsible for making this type of decision with regard to restrictive measures related to COVID-19.”

For Ferrer, the compulsory use of a mask on the beach is a measure “disproportionate”, especially in Formentera, “where most of the time on beaches and natural outdoor spaces it can be guaranteed that people will be able to walk the necessary sanitary distance”.

Finally, Ferrer called for the measure to be ‘rethought’ and adapted ‘to each space and situation’, in addition to taking into account the ‘specificities’ of each territory and the ‘evolution’ of the pandemic.