From civil protection to emergency management

the evolution of the regulatory framework

Abstract

The precedents of the legislation on Civil Protection and Emergency Management are placed in the local services for the prevention and extinction of fires, in the Humanitarian International Law and in the Passive Defense emerged with the new aircraft weapons among World Wars. Their confluence creates a hierarchized system of attention of risks that evolves from the simple reaction to disasters towards prevention and intervention planning to face the situations of calamity or catastrophe, an authentic public service.

The silence on the Civil Protection in the Spanish Constitution of 1978 and in the Statutes of Autonomy generates the indetermination about the respective responsibilities of the territorial authorities and a complicated organization that is not solved by the Civil Protection Act of 1985. The solution to the faults and incoherences of the legislation has be given in a long process in which have intervened the Spanish Constitutional Court decisions, the statutory implementation of the Civil Protection Act and the Autonomous Communities through their own Acts, as well as the reform of the Statutes of Autonomy in recent years.