- Government delegate criticizes “censorship, xenophobia, homophobia, machismo and exclusion that are amplified at high speed”
- The new Deputy Delegate of the Government in Barcelona celebrates taking office in a “stage of institutional normality”
Barcelona, December 11, 2024.- The government delegate in Catalonia, Carlos Prieto, has warned of the dangers of “hate speech” and has assured that “rights are not eternal, they must be worked on day by day with consensus and dialogue”. “Our duty is to protect and expand them,” he added.
Prieto has warned that in the global context the theses of those who question the democratic rights that have been so difficult to achieve are increasingly imposed. Thus, after analyzing the latest changes in EE.UU., in South Korea and Romania, he warned: “Progressive ideas are again being pursued.”
The delegate has focused on the fact that hate speech is also taking root in this country and its parliaments. “The policy of confrontation and disqualification is poison, a virus for our institutions and for coexistence,” he said.
“Ill-educated politics, antipolitics, hate speech or the attack on those who think differently have a clear goal: to destroy democracy,” he warned and criticized as “censorship, hate speech, xenophobia, homophobia, machismo and exclusion are amplified at great speed, especially in the digital environment and among the youngest.”
Against this background, Prieto has prescribed: “Faced with unreason, data; faced with hoaxes, information” and, in this sense, he stressed that The Economist has placed Spain as “the economy with the best results of the OECD, above countries such as Germany, France, Italy or the United States”, with “GDP growth close to 3%, unemployment at a minimum and with healthy public accounts”. According to the delegate, the British weekly also highlights “the dynamization of the labor market that immigration has contributed.” “Migrants are contributors”, he said and recalled that “they contribute 10% of the income that is collected each year in the field of Social Security when they spend only 1%”.
PUBLIC SERVANTS
Prieto said this Wednesday, during his speech at the inauguration of the office of the new subdelegate of the Government in Barcelona, Mari Carmen García-Calvillo, in an event that was held at the headquarters of the delegation of the Government in Catalonia and attended by the subdelegates of Girona, Pere Parramon; the one of Lleida, José Crespín and the subdelegate of accidental Tarragona, Carlos Miranda.
The Second Vice-President of the Mesa del Parlament, David Pérez; the Superior Prosecutor of Catalonia, Francisco Bañeres; the Mayor of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, David Quirós; and the Chief Prosecutor of Barcelona, Neus Pujal; as well as representatives of the National Police, the Civil Guard, Mossos d’Esquadra and the Barcelona City Guard and the military corps have also attended.
The government delegate has been committed “to democratic values, rights and freedoms, and compliance with the law” and, “as a public servant”, has defended the obligation to “side with justice, laws and the protection of fundamental rights”.
INSTITUTIONAL NORMALITY
The new deputy delegate of the Government in Barcelona has defended its “vocation of public service” coming from the “local world” and has assured that “that proximity, that proximity, is a way of understanding public service”. In addition, he has claimed that “public administrations are their workers”.
García-Calvillo is committed to “valuing the role of the administration, the value of the public, and especially the work of the subdelegations as an effective instrument of territorial structuring and approximation of the services provided by the State in the territory.”
He was pleased to take office in a “phase of institutional normality” and recalled that “many of the public services offered to citizens in the province of Barcelona are provided in collaboration with the Generalitat de Catalunya and its departments”.
In this sense, García-Calvillo has highlighted the commitment of the Government’s action to respond to global challenges such as “climate change, digital transformation, migrations, the fight against inequalities or the fight against gender violence”.
But he has warned that success in these issues “requires the sum of efforts, the sum of all administrations and the joint work to leave no one behind in overcoming these challenges.”
SUBDELEGATE PROFILE BARCELONA
Mari Carmen García-Calvillo (1971) is a political scientist and has been engaged in public service for more than thirty years. Graduated in Management and Public Administration from the University of Barcelona (UB), she has two postgraduate degrees, one in Communication and Political Strategy from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the Institut de Ciències Politiques i Socials, and another in Digital Transformation Direction from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC); in addition to a Master’s degree in Advanced Public Management from the UB.
Until her appointment, she has held the position of Director of Data Governance and Institutional Knowledge in the city of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat (Barcelona) from where she promoted the ‘Data Visualization Guide of L’Hospitalet’, considered good practice by the FEMP (Federation of Municipalities and Provinces), and the corporate Caixa d’Eines project in the field of data and visualization for municipal employees, which was awarded the first Alfonso Ortuño 2022 prize of the School of Public Administration of Catalonia in the category of development of teams and people.
García-Calvillo has been a member of the open data working group of the Network of Local Entities for Transparency and Citizen Participation of the FEMP, where he has participated in the writing of the book ‘Open Data: Strategic guide for its implementation. Data set to be published’.