The fuse was lit by the Tenants Union, which has been working for years to stop evictions like Marycarmen, an 87-year-old woman evicted on September 23 from the Retiro apartment where she had lived since she was 17. The union called a demonstration on September 26, “Not one more Marycarman” and set up a number of Marycarmen in the last part of the Pudel.
On October 7, María del Carmen Abascal died at the Gregorio Maran Hospital in Madrid, and the union then announced it was withdrawing its official presence in Sol, but the camp continued. The city council and community considered it illegal due to municipal ordinances, and the government delegation did not order an eviction. Now, according to El Mundo, Almeida’s team is reviewing the videos frame by frame in search of possible crimes committed by the campers. To do this they turn to AI. For those who support protest, it is ideological oppression; For Consistory, to investigate crimes. We can analyze what the law says.
The camera continues recording. The system has been in operation since 2024 and allows tracking people and objects within hours of recording: if there is a complaint and the suspect is wearing a red shirt and dark pants, it looks for that frame and follows him around the square.
Police sources assured 2025 that faces are tracked only after a complaint and for a specific investigation, not in preventive sweeps. Finding a red shirt is not the same as identifying a face, and almost the entire legal debate is confined to that. Sol’s public cameras, however, have been without access for several weeks, completely offline. After the last renovation, where they installed four new cameras, there were already 7 surveillance points in the square alone.
Constitution and Treaties. Camping to protest is an exercise of the right of assembly (Article 21 of the Constitution) and expression; Monitoring him affects privacy (Article 18). The European Court of Human Rights ruled in Gluckin v. Russia (2023): a peaceful protester in the Moscow metro was marked with facial recognition and the Court violated Articles 8 and 10 of the Convention. The Russian case is more extreme, but the criteria, requirements and prior guarantees also bind Spain.
Second Line: Video Surveillance Act. Organic Law 4/1997 makes police cameras subject to prior approval with a report from a guarantee commission and establishes that recordings are normally destroyed within one month. The camp is about to turn: the images of the early days are about to end, unless they involve criminal acts Also, Bio Law 7/2021, which transposes the European Police Data Protection Directive, restricts biometric data to “strictly necessary”.
What about AI regulation? Its Article 26.10 obliges anyone using delayed biometric identification to search a suspect to request judicial authorization, within a maximum of 48 hours, and to delete the data if this is denied. But the Digital Omnibus, released in July, postponed those obligations to Dec. 2, 2027. Bans such as real-time biometric identification remain in force from 2025, with exceptions, but do not cover recorded video. The EU has already decided that testing with biometrics requires judicial control, although this is not yet enforceable.
where is the line Critics distinguish two situations. If a specific person is sought for a reported offence, it is an investigation. If you review everything that happened in the camp, it’s worth watching more protests to see what comes out. To know which one we’re in, we need to answer three things: what crime and what charges are behind it, whether facial recognition is used and not just description, and who approves and how long the images are kept.
Another version. Defenders of the municipal action maintain that the cameras are legally installed, that the police must investigate what is reported, and that there is no surveillance based on the concept. They also note that AI-generated fake videos are being circulated to discredit campers, so it’s worth both sides checking what really happened.
The judge is under trial. Evidence obtained for violation of fundamental rights has no effect (Article 11.1 of the Organic Law of the Judiciary). If any complaint arises from these images, it will be up to the courts to decide whether the procedure was legal. We have already said it on other occasions: there is no crime in watching, it matters who watches, with what permission and for what purpose.
Cover image Adapted from an original by Eduardo Parra for Europa Press
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