Law 20/2022 on Democratic Memory: three years on, what is the current situation?
Three years have passed since Law 20/2022 on Democratic Memory (hereinafter LMD) came into force on 21 October 2022. This law expands and updates the 2007 Historical Memory Law, adapting it to new social and political circumstances and to the recommendations made by the United Nations and other international organisations and NGOs.
However, passing a law is one thing, and implementing it is another, requiring both regulatory development and sufficient budgetary resources to ensure its effective application. In this regard, several articles of the Law still lack implementing regulations, and several organisations and associations have criticised the slowness and inefficiency of its implementation and the lack of justice for victims.
The LMD is based on four fundamental principles: truth, justice, reparation and the duty to remember, establishing public policies to respond to each of these principles. It is important to focus on each of them in order to briefly analyse their successes and failures.
RIGHT TO THE TRUTH
This section covers public actions related to the investigation, location and identification of missing persons.
In accordance with the provisions of Article 16 of the Law, the State is responsible for actively searching for persons who disappeared during the Civil War and the dictatorship, using maps drawn up for this purpose. Last November, the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory presented the project ‘The country of 6,000 graves’, developed in collaboration with RTVE. This is an interactive map of the irregular burials from the Civil War and the dictatorship, which geolocates all the mass graves and indicates their status: fully or partially exhumed, not exhumed, or missing.
In 2019, the Aranzadi Science Society estimated that the bodies of some 20,000 people could be recovered from these graves. The First Four-Year Exhumation Plan has enabled the recovery of the remains of 8,941 victims. The Second Four-Year Exhumation Plan (2025-2028) aims to recover all the victims of Francoism by 2027.
However, in addition to exhuming the remains, the victims must be identified, and unfortunately only seventy of these nearly nine thousand people have been identified and returned to their families. To do so, the State DNA Bank for Victims of War and Dictatorship, whose creation is provided for in Article 23 of the LMD, is essential, but it is still not operational for mass identification. Furthermore, it is not authorised to search for stolen babies, as for DNA samples to be admitted into the database, a prior complaint for the abduction of the child must have been admitted, and so far none of these complaints has been admitted by the courts.
In the meantime, identifications are being made using private resources and those of the autonomous communities themselves, but the centralisation and implementation of the state system is still lacking.
Nor does the State Victims Census currently exist, the preparation of which was commissioned in February 2025 to the University of Santiago de Compostela (Histagra-CISPAC) through the Cenomi Project.
RIGHT TO JUSTICE
The LMD creates the position of Public Prosecutor for Human Rights and Democratic Memory to investigate acts that constitute violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. Since the appointment of Dolores Delgado in June 2023 as the first prosecutor in this position, 45 provincial deputy prosecutors specialising in human rights and democratic memory have been appointed, covering virtually all Spanish provinces.
Despite the existence of this new position and the fact that the entry into force of the LMD meant the immediate annulment of all convictions and sanctions imposed during the war and the dictatorship, the law does not allow for the investigation of crimes committed during the Franco regime. More than a hundred complaints filed in recent years for torture, deaths and stolen babies have been dismissed or shelved by the competent courts. Memorialist groups call for more forceful legislation in this regard and argue that the only way to end impunity for Francoist crimes would be to repeal or amend the 1977 Amnesty Law.
RIGHT TO REPARATION
The LMD is known as the Grandchildren’s Law because it establishes as a reparatory measure the possibility of acquiring Spanish nationality for people born outside Spain to exiled parents or grandparents, or to Spanish women who lost their nationality by marrying foreigners, as well as to brigadistas and their descendants.
This measure has been very well received and it is estimated that more than two million people may apply for Spanish nationality, with Argentina and Cuba leading the way in terms of the number of applicants. To date, more than 200,000 of these applications have been estimated and 171 descendants of brigadistas have already been granted nationality.
However, other reparatory measures included in the law have not been fulfilled, such as the investigation and audit of plundered property and the inventory of buildings and works carried out by prisoners and other victims of forced labour.
DUTY TO REMEMBER
Today, the duty to remember is particularly relevant, given the rise of the far right and denialist and revisionist discourse around the world, which, in the case of Spain, has led almost a quarter of young people to defend an authoritarian system and admire the Franco dictatorship.
The LMD has not fulfilled some of its objectives in this regard.
The Catalogue of symbols and elements contrary to democratic memory (Article 36) has not yet been published, despite the fact that the Royal Decree establishing the procedure for its preparation was approved less than a month ago. Some autonomous communities, led by Madrid, are reluctant to apply the LMD, and many municipalities refuse to change the names of squares and streets or to remove Francoist monuments and symbols. Llanos del Caudillo (Ciudad Real), Alberche del Caudillo (Toledo), Villafranco del Guadiana (Badajoz), Alcocero de Mola (Burgos), Quintanilla de Onésimo (Valladolid) and San Leonardo de Yagüe (Soria) have retained their names and have not been penalised for breaking the law, despite the fact that the law provides for fines of up to €10,000.
The LMD also establishes measures in the field of education and teacher training to promote knowledge of history and democratic memory and the struggle for democratic values and freedoms. Researchers Enrique Javier Díez Gutiérrez and Jonatan Rodrigues López, from the University of León, have analysed this specific aspect of the law and their conclusions are devastating: Franco’s repression, the anti-Franco struggle and transitional justice mechanisms are practically absent or diluted in educational content. In addition, some autonomous communities have repealed their memory laws and replaced them with ‘concord’ laws, in an ideological war against what they consider to be progressive ‘indoctrination.’ The application of the LMD has therefore failed in this regard.
With the approval of the LMD, the Valley of the Fallen, the main monument to Francoism, regained its original name of Cuelgamuros and was declared a place of democratic memory. On 12 November, the winning project was chosen in the international competition organised by the Spanish Government to redefine the monument and its surroundings.
Three years after its entry into force, the implementation of the LMD has had mixed results. Although it represents an undeniable step forward in the recognition of victims, its implementation faces stubborn realities: justice remains elusive when it comes to investigating the crimes of the Franco regime, the application and development of some of its provisions is proving too slow, and there is undeniable political resistance to its implementation in territories governed by the right.
Natalia Bosch Betancor, collaborator in FIBGAR.
