# The Use of Drones in Spain: Towards a Platform for Controlling UAVs in Urban Environments
## 3 Current Legislation in Europe Regarding UAVs and Its Legal Transposition into Spanish Law
However, the use of UAVs for legal purposes has raised many doubts since the legislator often fails to decouple the concept of electronic evidence (\"Any material support that expresses or incorporates data, facts or narratives with evidentiary effectiveness or any other type of legal relevance\" --Article 26 of the Spanish Penal Code), since we often dissociate the physical element of the UAV from the intangible information that lies in it, whereas we should really refer to a common concept based on a binomial between a physical and a logical part. From this point of view, we would deal with two sources of evidence: the device and the information contained within it. The UAV as a whole should be considered as electronic evidence,thus we must refer to obtaining the images captured with the UAV in such a way that they do not infringe the fundamental rights of the person under investigation. In this regard, the enactment of a regulation on the collection of electronic evidence on the European grounds is urgent, as it allows for subsequent transposition into national law, underpinning this decree on the ISO/IEC 27037:2012 standard \"Information technology--Security techniques--Guidelines for identification, collection, acquisition and preservation of digital evidence\" [16], which establishes minimum standards that could easily be implemented. Having dealt with the issues of obtaining and securing evidentiary material, we now have to consider the types of evidence that a UAV can provide in a judicial process. UAVs can make photographic or video documentations which could be recorded words, sounds or images, as regulated under art. 299.2 of the Spanish Civil Procedure Law (Ley de Enjuciamiento Civil Espanola), which states that \"according to this law, recorded images, words and sounds are admitted as evidence, as well as the devices which allow to archive, recognize or reproduce words, data, figures and mathematical operations carried out for accounting or other purposes and which are relevant to the process\". There is also a supplement to this law, called art. 382 LECiv., which further regulates the practice. It states that \"The parties can provide as source of proof, before the court, words, images and sounds recorded with a filming or recording device or other similar\" and \"The party providing such evidence to the court, should also hand a written transcript of the words contained in the recorded evidence, whenever this applies and which are relevant to the case\". On the other hand, if we want to include the device itself as evidence, we should refer to art. 384 LECiv, which states that \"the devices that allow to archive, recognize or reproduce words, data, figures and mathematical operations carried out for accounting or other purposes, which are relevant to the case, will be admitted as evidence and shall be examined by the court with tools provided by the proposing party or which the court may decide to use and in such a way that the other parties involved in the case may, with the same knowledge as the court, assert and express what is in their best interest\". Moreover, the second point states that \"the documentation should be stored on file in a way that is most suited and where the court clerk shall also, where appropriate, adopt custody measures\". In this regard, not only an examination of the \"content\" is necessary but also of the \"device\" storing this evidence. This will allow verifying that the submitted evidence is accurate and authentic. Moreover, the other party can submit and propose whatever it deems appropriate in this respect, in accordance with the principle of contradiction. In this way, external part of the UAV becomes part of the evidence presented in a court process, as a device used for archiving data. The UAV must be presented to the judge directly, that is, through judicial recognition of the hardware, which in turn is supervised by the Attorney of the Administration of Justice.