Criminal law
Published on June 22nd, 2026
Some workplace accidents do not stay inside employment and civil law, because they carry a criminal dimension too, and the charge then looks at what was missing before the accident.
The Criminal Code punishes the failure to provide the means necessary for workers to carry out their work with adequate safety measures, where this places their life or health in serious danger (articles 316 and 317 of the Criminal Code). It is an offense of endangerment, which is to say it can exist even where no harm comes about at all.
The offense protects the safety of workers as a legal interest, and not just the harmful outcome. Liability falls on whoever is legally obliged to provide those means (article 318 for legal persons): the employer, directors, supervisors or prevention officers, according to the actual allocation of duties. It may run alongside offenses of result (injury or reckless homicide) where the accident does cause harm.
Where work on a construction site is carried out at height without the mandatory collective protections (guardrails, nets) and without the appropriate individual equipment having been provided, the situation may already constitute the offense under article 316 even if no worker actually falls, since safety has been placed in serious danger without providing the required means.
If a worker does fall and is injured, the offense of endangerment may run alongside an offense of result (injury). Liability does not fall automatically on the company as an abstract entity either, since article 318 directs it to the directors or supervisors who, being able to prevent it, did not take the measures, which makes the opening question in a file of this kind who actually carried the duty.
The line between compliance and criminal reproach runs through the risk assessment, the training and the effective provision of protective means, all of them documents and facts. The best defense available is to show that compliance was genuine and not merely documentary, and that is built before the accident.
As the evidence is almost everything in these cases, I reconstruct the facts, check the wording in force on the relevant date and examine the documents that decide the matter: risk assessment, training, the handover of equipment, inspection reports. I take on the defense of the company and those responsible, and also act for the worker when I represent them.
If you are facing something like this, I will ask you for the risk assessment for the position and the record of equipment handover, where much of the answer usually lies, long before any trial. Where the allegation is aimed at the person running the company rather than at the organization, the line is drawn differently, and I explain that in the criminal liability of directors. You can see the rest of my work in criminal law and, if you need it handled in English, criminal defense in Barcelona.
Editorial responsibility: Carles Jiménez, Spanish lawyer (Barcelona Bar No. 34.946). This note was prepared with the assistance of artificial-intelligence tools and reviewed and approved by the author before publication.
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