Effectiveness of personal coercion in matters of maintenance. Analysis of its effectiveness in the face of the debtor's economic impossibility

Abstract

This article presents a critical argument regarding the application of personal coercion to debtors of alimony with limited economic resources, specifically, those who find it difficult to obtain a stable job with all the benefits of the law and who have no other means to meet this obligation. This situation is averse to what is considered the main reason why a personal coercion measure could become ineffective. This research presents a qualitative methodological approach, which allows us to show in the following lines how, in practice, the non-observance of the socioeconomic, economic and labor situation of the debtor is inversely proportional to the effectiveness of the restrictive measure of freedom. To achieve this, the analytical-synthetic, inductive and historical-logical methods are applied as scientific methods. As a result, the judge is obliged to measure the application of coercion according to constitutional evaluative criteria and that they are applied to the economic-material circumstances of each debtor, on an individual basis and not as a yardstick. This prevents the breach of the obligation from becoming worse and the personal coercion from losing its protective and guaranteeing character, which is why its applicability in the concept of a debt enjoys constitutional exceptionality.