Article 556 Spanish Criminal Code: Resisting or Disobeying Police Officers

Article 556 of the Spanish Criminal Code covers the conduct that falls short of an assault on authority: serious resistance to police officers and serious disobedience of their orders. It is the charge that follows most street incidents, identity checks and arrests where nobody was struck, and it is also the provision under which a great many foreign nationals are prosecuted for having failed to comply with an instruction they did not understand. The penalty may be a fine alone, which makes early classification under this article rather than article 550 the central objective of the defence.

Wording of Article 556 of the Spanish Criminal Code

Elements of the offence

1. Conduct that does not amount to assault on authority under article 550, so the two provisions are mutually exclusive: the court must choose one.
2. Resistance or disobedience that is serious. The qualifier does real work: minor or purely passive non-compliance is an administrative infringement under the public safety legislation, not an offence.
3. An order or instruction that is lawful, that falls within the officer’s powers, that is clear and that has been repeated with a warning of the consequences of non-compliance.
4. A victim who is a person in authority, an agent of authority, or private security personnel who are duly identified and operating in cooperation with and under the command of the security forces.

Defence strategy

The gravity threshold. The provision punishes serious resistance, not any resistance. The defence dissects the conduct actually recorded in the report: refusing to produce identification, remaining seated, walking away, arguing or shouting are, on their own, matters for the administrative penalty regime of the public safety legislation, and the criminal courts routinely dismiss such cases. The argument turns on the officers’ own description of the physical conduct rather than on their characterisation of it.

The order was not understood. Serious disobedience requires knowledge of the order. Where instructions were given in Spanish at speed to a defendant who does not speak the language, the mental element is absent, and the file frequently shows that no interpreter was present at the scene. Establishing this at the outset, and confirming from the custody record when an interpreter was first provided, is often decisive for tourists and recently arrived residents.

Lawfulness and the form of the order. An order outside the officer’s powers, given without identification of the officer, or given once and without warning, cannot support the offence. Where the underlying police action was itself unlawful, such as a search or an entry without a legal basis, the resistance to it loses its criminal character, and the defence raises the point through the material obtained on disclosure.

Reclassification to paragraph 2 or agreed disposition. Where the conduct was verbal, reclassification to the lack of due respect in paragraph 2, punished only by a fine of one to three months, resolves the case with minimal consequences. Where the evidence is strong, an agreed disposition secures the fine rather than a custodial sentence together with the one third reduction, which preserves the position of a foreign national seeking to renew a residence authorisation.

• Resistance and disobedience: defence service
• Article 550: assault on authority
• Article 520 LECrim: rights in police custody
• Spanish-language entry

This entry is provided for information only and does not constitute legal advice. The application of any provision depends on the circumstances of the individual case and requires examination of the case file by a qualified lawyer.