by: Jordi Cuixart, President of Òmnium Cultural (Edited by Mark Buckton)
Jordi Cuixart, President of Òmnium Cultural speaking at a public gathering before his arrest.
For a year now I have been locked up in a cell and I look at the sky through bars. For a year now I have seen my 18-month old son for just a few hours each month. For a year now I have had no cellphone or Internet access. For a year now I can only follow what is happening in my company from afar. For a year now I have been held without bail, and without a trial date to defend my fundamental rights in any democracy; freedom of speech and the freedom to meet and protest. For a year now I have been a political prisoner, a hostage held by the Spanish government.
If Spain is a democracy, how is this possible?
How can there be political prisoners if the Franco dictatorship supposedly ended more than 40 years ago?
Spain has an enormous political problem with Catalonia, yet it is incapable of facing it in the only way possible in modern democracies, which is with a political solution. Instead they are trying to resolve it using the police and judges, without realizing that this only makes the problem bigger.
If 80% of any people say they want to vote on their political future in a referendum, as is the case in Catalonia, you can’t really pretend that you aren’t hearing this call.
When Canada and Great Britain heard such a call they decided to negotiate referendums with Quebec and Scotland. When more than two million Catalans turn out to vote, as happened on October 1st last year, the government sent in Spanish police to beat up peaceful citizens. And if you want to be considered as a country following the rule of law, you cannot send innocent people to jail or into exile, as is happening right now in Spain.
When I was arrested a year ago I was accused of sedition for climbing on top of a Spanish police car (with the permission of the policemen inside) with claims that I had done so to incite a siege and violence by the aforementioned very peaceful protesters I was attempting to disperse.
@jcuixart i @jordisanchezp només van demanar a la gent tornar a casa i dissoldre manifestació del 20S @omnium @assemblea #LlibertatJordis pic.twitter.com/oubPafG4Xw
— Robert ?||*|| (@ossetbru) October 17, 2017
When videos surfaced of that day showing that I was asking the protesters to go home the Spanish government switched the charges from sedition to rebellion. Now I am accused of inciting people to participate in the October 1st, 2017, referendum, and urging them to block the Spanish police as they aggressively entered polling stations to stop the vote.
Both charges are false and have been filed without evidence. It is a farce.
A year ago, the paceful activist Jordi Sánchez and Jordi Cuixart were put into jail for nonexisten crimes. The State charge them for rebelion and violent acts during the Sept. 20 clashes. Here, you can see Cuixart calming down the people and protecting the Police men from them. pic.twitter.com/tyb7PA6XAW
— Joan Mangues (@jmangues) October 16, 2018
When my trial begins it will be very difficult to sustain the current charge of rebellion, and if I am convicted we will appeal to the European Union’s justice system.
Spain has already seen that Germany, the UK and Belgium have refused to grant their European Arrest Warrant petitions to extradite elected members of the Catalan government who fled seeking protection from similar charges, as judges in these countries recognized the charges as baseless under Spanish law.
Is Spain the only country that doesn’t understand that the violence committed in Catalonia was carried out by their own policemen beating peaceful voters - scenes shown on TV and the front pages of newspapers around the world? Is it so hard to understand that ballots and ballot boxes are not dangerous weapons in a democracy?
Spain embarked on a dangerous path some years ago: one of increasingly cutting back individual and collective human rights to the point where they have now reached intolerable limits. The EU is focusing on Poland and Hungary in this regard, but would do well to look with a more critical eye towards Spain’s growing democracy deficit.
For some time now it is not just pro-independence Catalans who are prosecuted for exercising their basic rights. Spain has also shut down websites and newspapers, and even convicted singers and puppeteers for their artistic efforts in this regard.
The “Catalonia crisis” has too long been at an impasse. It is an urgent political problem in need of a political solution.
There are seven pro-independence leaders who have gone into exile, including Catalan President Carles Puigdemont, and nine of us are imprisoned, held without bail or trial.
Foreign politicians of all political stripes, Nobel Peace Prize winners, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have all criticized this situation, calling for negotiations and for us to be released. Since no progress seems possible with the Spanish government, perhaps it is time for international mediation whereby the EU itself or a European government plays a role.
It just isn’t right that there are political prisoners like me in Spain, or anywhere else in 21st century Europe.