# 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  
This section describes the legislation in Europe and Spain, especially the Spanish laws that were passed in December 2017. The European Union has to create new laws as information technologies evolve. The continuous progress in technology is a challenge to EU policies and regulations. This is because technology provides us with increasing possibilities that must be regulated under the law to protect citizens' rights and interests. Several institutions have already been set up in Europe to work on these issues, however our project goes much further. In this context, the European UAV market is growing larger every year. To date, at least sixteen of the twenty-eight EU Member States already use UAVs for military and police purposes. The EU placed security projects as one of the priorities on its agenda and began to invest in UAV proposals. In 2012, a report on Aeronautic Industries announced a plan for developing UAV legislation for both commercial and safety purposes. This report pointed to the emerging UAV market and expressed the need for regulating the operation of these systems. The next step was taken in 2017 when the European Commission published a report on UAVs [11]. In it, it set the alignment of different national UAV legislations as one of Horizon 2020 goals and it called on the individual member states to adopt measures that will allow for the integration of these systems in the European civil airspace. However, this goal has been postponed until 2050 [12]. Making progress on the issue of reaching to a common legislation will be a complicated task. This is because international conventions on international civil aviation, such as the Chicago Convention, apply only to civil aircraft but not to State aircraft, the latter defined as devices used in military, customs and police services, including UAVs used by public administrations for the protection and restoration of the environment. However, article 8 of the Convention does not allow any unmanned aircraft to fly over the territory of any State without the authorization of that State. As a result of article 8 of the Convention, the priority of aviation institutions such as ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization), EUROCONTROL (European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation) or EASA (European Aviation Safety Agency) must be to promote European regulation. This would be key for updating conventions in search of a comprehensive directive. Following this first indication, European institutions should promote aviation regulation; in 2014, the Commission published \"A new era for aviation--Opening the aviation market to the civil use of remotely piloted aircraft systems in a safe and sustainable manner\" [11]. According to this document, by 2016, the EU should have adopted measures to allow for the integration of these systems into civil airspace. However, security responsibilities are left in large part to the Member States. That is why UAVs used for police purposes are still excluded from any current European legislation, since it has resulted in very disparate regulations (if any) in the different EU states with regard to these systems and harmonization in this respect is necessary. It is necessary to have a legislation that will be open and generic in the technical aspects. This is because legislations that are limited to specific aircraft types or only permit the use of remote controls with certain characteristics would become obsolete in the near future, as new advances in the field of UAVs appear. In addition, they could easily lead to confusion and legal problems. Furthermore, regulations should not only consider the civil liability of these devices but also aspects that will assure the security of the state and of citizens, for example the protection of data in deployed vehicles. These regulations should also indicate the legal consequences of inadequate use or combining their military and police uses.