In 2019, nine high-ranking Catalan pro-independence politicians and leading activists were sentenced to between 9 and 13 years in jail for their roles in the 2017 referendum, with the Supreme Court finding them guilty of sedition, a crime that was written into the penal code in 1822. Sánchez said that this move will put Spain’s criminal code “on the same level” as that of its neighbors such as France, Italy, and Switzerland. Indeed, the head of the government said that Germany removed the crime of sedition in 1970 and replaced it with one similar to that which the Spanish government parties will put forward on Friday.

The announcement coincides with the need of the Socialists to persuade some pro-independence parties to pass the Spanish 2023 budget, although Sánchez denied that it was the reason for his plans. All pro-independence parties have been asking for an amnesty for those who still face ongoing judicial cases stemming from the 2017 independence push. While Sánchez made clear in the interview that the move is not an amnesty, he did say that the decision aims to further de-escalate the political conflict with Catalonia and “put an end” to the independence push that peaked in 2017.

Reactions

Shortly after the announcement, Catalan president Pere Aragonès welcomed the news on Twitter, saying that “the elimination of the crime of sedition is an essential step for dejudicialization.” “We continue to work in order to put a complete end to repression and to be able to vote in a referendum, to resolve the political conflict and for freedom.”

The secretary general of Junts, Jordi Turull, said that the sedition reform seemed like “a tailor-made suit” to say that the events of October 2017 were a crime. In addition, he said that it is not a repeal, but that the criminal type is simply transformed and will allow the pursuit of independence to continue. “A repeal is what Zapatero did when he removed illegal referendums from the penal code. He erased it and did not change it for anything”, he declared.

The People’s Party secretary general, Cuca Gamarra, reacted very differently. She said Sánchez is “paying the price of being able to stay longer in the post at the expense of equality before the law.” Far-right Vox’s leader in Catalonia, Ignacio Garriga, said that “there is no bigger traitor than Sánchez.” Meanwhile, the also unionist Ciudadanos party head, Inés Arrimadas, said that the PM is “dismantling the criminal code.” “It sets a very dangerous precedent and gives in to separatists arbitrarily.”

As for Jaume Asens, the congressional president of anti-austerity Unidas Podemos, he believes Sánchez “has complied with his commitment.” “Democracy wins,” he added also on Twitter.

Potential impact on exiled Puigdemont

Sánchez also made clear that exiled Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, who has been in Brussels ever since the failed declaration of independence of 2017 in order to avoid sitting in the dock in Spain, would still have to “face justice” if he were to return. Puigdemont is not only being wanted in Spain for sedition but also for misuse of public funds, which may imply prison. PSOE’s speaker at the Spanish Congress, Patxi López, went even further and said that the extradition of those in exile will be now possible after the reform: “The sanctuaries are over”.

In a recent letter, the exiled leader denied wanting to return in the event of a move such as that which was announced on Thursday by Sánchez. “I understand that me accepting a resolution [of the conflict] based on the reform of the criminal code could benefit Spain, but I cannot see anywhere how this would benefit the Catalan independence campaign,” Puigdemont said in late October. “I do not seek or want this personal benefit,” he pointed out, adding that accepting a personal solution would be “giving up politically.”

Also, the Spanish PM anticipated potential criticism of unionist hardliners saying that the reform of sedition “will not weaken” Spain ahead of another independence push. Sánchez did not mention other exiled leaders, such as Marta Rovira, in Switzerland, who is only accused of sedition.

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Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced the investment agreement on Thursday after meeting with Chuck Robbins, the CEO of the digital communications conglomerate, at the headquarters of the Spanish government.

Cisco is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation that develops, manufactures and sells networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology services and products.

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Miquel Àngel Llauger, poet and translator, and head of PEN’s persecuted writers committee, was in charge of announcing the award and talk about the importance of Victoria Lomasko. The press conference had to be held online because the Russian artist couldn’t travel to Barcelona to collect the award due to visa problems. Lomasko  fled Russia last 5 March and currently lives  in Germany.

Llauger explained that Victoria Lomasko deserves the Free Voice award because she has suffered repression, because she is out of Russia, her country, and she is so not by choice, and she does not know if she will be able to return there, and especially because she has shown courage with her art. “This award also wants to be a denunciation of European asylum policy.” Lomasko has been forced to file a complaint, but her natural vocation is to be an artist and that’s enough, Llauger clarified. Therefore, she also deserves the award because she has taken on a civic obligation that she was not looking for and because being an artist is a privilege that she is being currently denied: “Journalists always ask me about Putin, not about my art”, Lomasko explained.

Lomasko’s Catalan publisher, Matilde Martínez Sallés, thanked the award but also regretted that her last books now have an echo due to the current political situation, although Godall Edicions started publishing her long before the Ukrainian war. “Victoria Lomasko’s work is important above political circumstances.” She also emphasized that this award is a show of solidarity with people who do not have a passport, and that it will serve to spread Victoria Lomasko’s speech against Putin’s dictatorship.

“As a Russian person, it is very important for me to receive this award”, thanked Lomasko, “because not everyone in the world is ready to do anything good for someone who is Russian today, and many people have turned their backs on the Russian people.” “Russians and Putin are not the same”, she emphasized. Lomasko wanted to thank the support of Matilde Martínez Sallés at all times, and her other editors in other languages, and all the people who see her as an artist and not as a Russian. “I can’t change my passport.”

“I try to transform my traumas, which are those of a person who has been oppressed, into art. I belong to a generation that remembers every detail of the Soviet regime. My father was a painter for the Soviet regime and we had a house full of portraits of Stalin, but he hated the Soviet regime. I grew up looking for another path, a path outside official art. Living in Russia doesn’t help you make great art, but you can take a piece of paper, draw something small on it and then put it in your pocket and maybe flee the country.” Lomasko also explained that she had to work in the West because her texts were not published in Russia. Then she returned to Russia and always ran the risk of being arrested for her art. There were very few artists who opposed Putin before 24 February, when war was declared in Ukraine.

“Now I’m in Italy, in Brescia, preparing an exhibition of my 150 pieces that will also be called The Last Soviet Artist. And I wrote an essay about my exile, because I don’t just feel like an artist, I also feel like a writer. And sometimes I need to write before I can draw.” According to Lomasko, art is a magical door to a wonderful world, art can change people, and she wants to be only an artist, she wants to have this privilege that artists from other countries that are not in conflict have.

“I don’t want to go back to my country as it is now. I escaped from Russia. That country is no longer my homeland. I miss my family, my friends, my apartment, my neighbors, nature, but I am not ready to go back to a country where they are willing to eliminate my works and even myself. I consider myself an international artist and this is how I think when I make my art.” Now Lomasko is in Italy, in Brescia, and she will return to Germany, but she constantly struggles to obtain visas, moving from country to country, and hoping to be able to return to Barcelona, ​​where she came in September to present a book.

“In every Russian family there are people from Ukraine. In every Ukrainian family there are people from Russia. There are Russian people who help Ukrainians and who contribute to mitigating this hatred against Russians. We are living in a very dark period. For Ukrainians it is a tragedy, the end of the world. For Russians it is very hard, because the war also destroys our country. But I want to think that all of this will be a lesson on how to build the global world in the future”. These were the parting words of Victoria Lomasko, the Russian and international graphic artist, now in exile.

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“I am deeply astonished by the words and tone in which an official body of the Spanish electoral administration denigrated the work of the former President of the European Parliament David Sassoli” begins the text accessed by VilaWeb. And it goes on: “We are all aware that the former President Sassoli acted in full within the law by applying, immediately and to the letter, the ruling of the European Court of Justice of 19/12/ 2019 (C-502-19), respecting institutional roles and cautiously avoiding entering into the substance of the debate”.

Then, the letter takes a very forceful tone against the JEC’s response to Metsola’s request on the status of pro-independence MEPs: “I express my outrage at the  attempt to sully the memory of our former colleague David Sassoli. Since you have pledged to defend and honour the memory of David Sassoli, I kindly ask you to continue to do so even against those, such as the Central Electoral Commission (JEC) of the Kingdom of Spain, who attempts to instrumentalise the deeds and legacy of a great European like David Sassoli. ”

The letter ends by saying: “Firmly rejecting such acts is a duty not only for the memory of David Sassoli but also for the integrity and prestige of the European Parliament.” The letter is signed by MEPs Massimiliano Smeriglio, Brando Benifei, Franco Roberti, Pietro Bartolo, Elisabetta Gualmini, Camilla Laureti and Alessandra Moretti.

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The awards ceremony will take place on 10 December in Reykjavík, Iceland, only days before the hit Catalan-language movie will find out if it has been shortlisted for the Oscars.

Alcarràs, which tells the story of the last fruit harvest on a farm in western Catalonia, already won the prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlinale film festival last February.

A Catalan-language movie starring non-professional actors, it is the biggest Catalan box office hit of the year, selling around 300,000 cinema tickets in under a month after its release.

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In a press conference in Brussels on Tuesday, Dutch MEP and inquiry committee rapporteur Sophie in ‘t Veld stated that Spain was “probably” NSO Group’s first client in the European Union. “We have very little official information on what is happening but what we do see is that there are strong indications that politicians and others have been monitored, spied upon, with no evident, imminent, immediate threat to national security,” in ‘t Veld said of Spain.

“We warmly invite Spanish authorities to provide us with more information so we can assess the situation,” she said, adding that she understood it was “a very delicate” matter. The draft report also suggests that, as Spanish authorities have only admitted to 18 of the 65 cases revealed by Citizen Lab, “it is not possible to determine” that the independence movement posed a “threat to national security or the integrity of the state.”

Velvet gloves for internal threats

The Dutch MEP was very critical of what she described as the EU’s “firm” stance against external threats to democracy, including new Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s stance on content moderation, while being “silent” about threats that do not come from “some faraway stranger but the governments of EU member states.”

And although the European Commission fights attacks on democracy from the outside and has a democracy action plan to counter fake news, she said “the commission suddenly considers that the defense of EU democracy is no longer a European matter, but a matter for the member states” when threats come from within. “The commission shows muscle to Musk, but velvet gloves to member states using spyware on citizens.”

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The United Kingdom, which hosts World Travel Market London 2022 from November 7–9, continues to be the second largest international tourism market for Catalonia, with 1,166,900 tourists visiting Catalonia from the UK between January and September 2022. “Considering that after the pandemic it remains our second biggest market, it is important that we spread the word to the operators that we are in this process of change towards a more ethical and innovative tourism,” said Narcís Ferrer, director of the Catalan Tourism Agency (ACT).

Tourism officials launched the Catalan stand at the tourism fair on Monday. It consists of more than 300m2 showcasing nine Catalan tourism brands and more than twenty companies and other organizations within the Catalan tourism sector.

Food and wine tourism

Catalonia also aims to position itself as the European benchmark for food and wine tourism, with a cocktail dinner to promote Catalonia’s food and wine offering taking place on Monday evening. Aimed at the British and Catalan tourism sectors, the event will show off the potential of Catalan cuisine at the hands of four young chefs: Núria Bonet (Ca La Núria), Elisabet Nolla (Normal), Zhou Mengxin (Somiatruites) and Mariona Rodà (Catalan finalist of the European Young Chef Award 2019).

The United Kingdom has traditionally been one of the main tourism markets for Catalonia. This summer, once the travel restrictions imposed by the British government were lifted, visitor numbers to Catalonia from the UK have bounced back. “In addition to approaching pre-pandemic figures, we are seeing that this market is becoming less seasonal, as September was the month within the summer period with most British tourist arriving (211,000 tourists), whereas until now they were concentrated during the months of June, July and August,” Ferrer explained.

Average British tourist

Seven airlines operate from the United Kingdom and Ireland to Catalonia, proving access to the three Catalan airports – Barcelona-El Prat, Girona-Costa Brava and Reus – from 25 different airports.

Looking ahead to 2023, the four airlines with the most flights to Catalonia will be Ryanair, EasyJet, Vueling and British Airways. The airports that will see the most flights to Catalonia from Britain and Ireland will be London Gatwick, London Heathrow, Dublin, London Stansted and Manchester.

The average British tourist arrives in Catalonia by plane, stays for 5.8 days and spends €199 euros per day. They usually stay in hotels and mostly visit for leisure and holidays.

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Kaleck was in Barcelona to promote the Spanish translation of one of his key works, Law Versus Power: Our Global Fight for Human Rights, in which he recounts in an autobiographical manner the most decisive cases he has been involved in, such as the lawsuits against those responsible for torture and the disappearances under the Argentinian dictatorship, or the case against Donald Rumsfeld for the use of torture in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Kaleck has paved the way for universal justice and the fight for human rights. And he continues to do so. He is currently Edward Snowden’s lawyer.

—What’s Snowden’s situation at present?
—You don’t need to be Snowden’s lawyer to appreciate that he’s in a tricky situation, thanks to the cowardly European countries and their double standards. This habit of celebrating enemy whistleblowers while punishing one’s own is disastrous. The growth in digital surveillance measures is so dangerous to all of our societies that the surveillers need to be surveilled.

—We need whistleblowers.
—It’s just that this can’t be achieved merely with good judges and politicians. We also need whistleblowers, people with courage who break rules and regulations, which they will need to justify later on -I don’t claim that being a whistleblower doesn’t mean you don’t have responsibilities, you must justify yourself. In Snowden’s case, when you discover violations of individual rights, citizen’s rights, human rights, and you do it with a certain spirit, not in the spirit of self-interest, there’s no way that this ought to be punished with a one thousand-year prison sentence in a top-security facility. It’s outrageous, and I’m really sorry that Snowden is now having to pay the price for the cowardice of European countries, like my own, Germany.

—Does the fact he’s in exile in Russia in the current context of the war in Ukraine make him feel uneasy?
—Of course. But I haven’t been able to meet up with him. First because of the pandemic and now because of the war, and I don’t know any more than you do. And I don’t want to discuss the situation, because it’s complicated. My job is to raise a stink about the attitude of the Western European countries, which make out they stand for democracy, but fail to act in cases like this.

—It must be even more complicated to do your job as Snowden’s lawyer at this time.
—Yes. At one time we hoped to find a way home for him. He has the advantage of being young, and the story isn’t over yet. So many things have happened in recent years that we hadn’t expected. Bad things, but also good stuff. I hope at some point we’ll find a way for him to come home, a solution that doesn’t involve punishment in the United States. The prison sentence they want to give him defies all legal logic. Thousands of years. It makes no sense at all.

—You fought against the crimes of the Argentinian dictatorship in accordance with the principle of universal justice when practically no one else was doing so. It was a learning experience. How did you go about it?
—It’s been a learning process right up until today. But I was able to do it because I had a progressive education and political training that included the idea of international solidarity. For me, from the beginning of my political involvement, it was important to fight at the local, regional level, but the struggles needed to be united and the idea of global justice needed to be developed.

—And how did those early experiences pan out?
—My first experience was in Guatemala. There we counted the missing and the murdered, and we tried to help the people who had lost colleagues, friends and relatives who had to go into exile. It was in the 1990s. At that time we had no prospect of justice or anything like that, it wasn’t even on our radar. About ten years later we got involved in the lawsuits in Argentina and Pinochet was arrested. And we saw that we could achieve things as lawyers, based on national law. We did so in the case of Argentina.

—And in Germany.
—A few Germans who knew nothing about the case, who didn’t even know where Argentina was, issued international arrest warrants against Videla and Massera. It was amazing. And they called for their extradition. And a few years later they appeared in court, stood trial and were convicted. It was a positive experience that really encouraged me. Then we decided to repeat the experience, and in the late nineties and early 2000s Madrid was the place to go. There were people there like Juan Garcés and Carlos Slepoy, the two exiled lawyers from Chile and Argentina, and off to one side Judge Garzón [Kaleck smiles and pauses briefly] with his image and his own background, of course. But the idea was clearly to universalize the Argentinian, Chilean and Spanish experience. I have to admit that it didn’t work, but neither did it fail.

—How do you mean?
—Between the nothing we had before and true justice, there’s a whole continuum. That, plus the first-hand experience I gained in Argentina and Chile. Direct and immediate action were important. And understanding that it wasn’t a football match, which you win or lose, but a political and legal struggle which all about moving forward.

—To keep going.
—Yes, maybe small steps, maybe big, including some small setbacks. You need to avoid major setbacks, of course. You have to take on risky cases, you need to accept the risk, but it mustn’t be a reckless risk.

—The important thing is to do it, more than anything else. It’s not so much about winning. That’s what you’re saying.
—Yes… [he laughs]. It’s a bit of an existentialist approach.

—You mean that it’s necessary to find the right path.
—Yes, but responsibly. I don’t want you to applaud me just because I do my job. Yes, sure, I come to Barcelona, we chat on this terrace, I drink a beer, people ask me what I do, and they tell me what a good job I do. Okay, I get it, but I’m not interested in applause simply for doing what we do; the really important thing is whether it makes sense, because this line of work isn’t about winning. Instead, we can move forward and we can universalize standards. That’s what it’s about. And we see it now in the case of Ukraine.

—Ukraine?
—Yes. The United States, which played a key role in international criminal justice after 1945, positioned itself more against it some time ago, in particular against the International Criminal Court. Now, however, together with the Western nations, they argue that Putin ought to be put on trial. What sort of a dual morality is that? It’s a double standard. It’s good that they’ve now acknowledged that war crimes, which are against the law, must be tried. We, as an organization, got involved in this fight, but not with the governments, but with Ukrainian NGOs, with the people on the ground. Meanwhile, this standard must be universalized, which is why we do not support a special international court for the war in Ukraine because we shouldn’t create special laws and courts.

—Wouldn’t a special court be useful?
—We need to make these standards universal, so that they apply to every conflict that occurs in the world. Many countries in the South also say ‘look, now that the Europeans have seen war at first hand, they realize what it means’. Prior to that, we used to look at it from the outside; now we’re asking ourselves what makes it possible for there to be a war, the arms trade and financial backers, for example. In other words, if you argue against the companies that have armed the Russians, then you ought to do the same with those that export weapons to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen, where there are even more fatalities.

—The idea is that universal standards for trying those responsible for war apply everywhere.
—And that they include transnational companies.

—It’s one of the fundamental parts of your work: that it should apply all over the world, at all times.
—Exactly.

—You work with Ukrainian civil society. Did they approach you for help?
—We were already in contact before 24 February because we are one of the main players in Europe in this type of litigation. A couple of weeks ago we had a meeting in Berlin with NGOs working in Ukraine, who are local. With the experience I gained in Argentina, with such a strong human rights movement, it’s clear that they have to develop their own vision, their own strategies, and we can contribute to that. They’re different kinds of cases, but there are courts in Ukraine, there’s the possibility of pursuing a case there, and we have to see how the interaction between courts in Ukraine works with the International Criminal Court and cases of universal jurisdiction in countries like Germany. We talked about all this, as we have done in other cases with colleagues from Syria, Belarus, Sri Lanka, Colombia and so on.

—Speaking of double standards: Argentina is dealing with its dictatorship, and you’re well aware that Spain isn’t. How do you explain the difference?
—Baltasar Garzón was a witness to what happened. At the end of the 1990s, many people, including the left in Argentina and Chile, were enthusiastic about the case against Pinochet. But there were people who were questioning how the colonizers had the gall to judge them. There was a certain feeling of “Let’s show the barbarians in the South how justice is done.” Some asked, and they had a valid point, “What do we do with the transnational companies that supported the dictatorships?” And this explains our case against Mercedes-Benz in Argentina. The dictatorship, both in Chile and in Argentina, had the objective of strengthening the neoliberal model, and in order to do this they had to destroy the labour movement and the left-wing government and the unions. Multinationals such as Ford and Mercedes-Benz were complicit in this. And there was one main point of criticism: why don’t they do justice to their own past? And it’s hard to understand, really, because in the Spanish case we’re not talking about hundreds of dead and missing, we’re talking about decades of crimes against humanity.

—And Garzón’s role, and his responsibility in other cases.
—He was heavily criticized at the time because he intervened in many cases that were not in line with those who supported Pinochet’s arrest. But he himself, a few years later, took on cases investigating the crimes of the Franco regime, and the truth is that they got rid of him for that reason. It’s really shocking. Seen from the outside, the fact that it happened was highly significant, as it was a test of the rule of law in Spain, which it failed. It totally flunked the test. That is a terrible shame, since I come from a country that has committed crimes of a magnitude that is difficult to match. I wouldn’t want to draw any parallels.

—But there were trials in Germany.
—The criminals responsible have been put on trial right up until the present day. Ninety-year-olds have stood trial. But it’s not so much about what sentence they receive, or whether they’re sent to prison; it’s about finding out what happened, doing research that brings us closer to the truth, and at the same time making some kind of reparations to the surviving victims. In the aftermath of WWII, the military, the secret services, judges, prosecutors, law professors and prominent doctors built a career out of Nazism and committed crimes with impunity. And the court cases we have now allow us to find out what happened. Just this week I read a two-page article about how SS criminals continued to serve in the [German] secret service after the war. It’s incredibly important that a society takes responsibility for what happened and I’m terribly sorry that this doesn’t happen in Spain.

—Perhaps it’s because in Spain there’s been continuity with the Franco regime, especially in certain areas such as its economic and judicial institutions.
—Without a doubt. There was also this continuity in Germany, but the war had victors, the allies, and this in itself meant a break with the past. And the West German constitution of 1949 was more or less democratic. But we needed a second break with the past, which was to be the student movement of 1968. The judiciary in Germany was dominated by older people, they were everywhere: judges, prosecutors, lawyers, with their books which for decades after the war included the names of the great jurists of Nazism. And from 1968 this began to change. Two much-needed breaks with the past, which Spain didn’t seem to have.

—In Spain, the president of the judiciary publicly invoked Carl Schmitt just two years ago.
—Ha, ha! Carl Schmitt is something else. Yes, he was an accomplice to Nazism, but the part of his work before 1933 is even more interesting. Because he trained generations of authoritarian jurists, and then there was his anti-Semitism and his legitimization of Hitler. I think his work before 1933 is even more dangerous, though it’s not as obvious as his anti-Semitism.

—You mean his friend-enemy distinction?
—Exactly. Because he says that a state can only survive if it has clearly defined who its enemies are.

—It’s what’s happened in Catalonia as a reaction against the pro-independence movement, to suppress it.
—Yes. And it’s not surprising. Because Schmitt’s work is part of the rationale used by the police and governments. And the most notorious example is the enemy criminal law.

—Are you aware of how it’s been applied in Catalonia?
—More or less, from the outside. But I know about it, of course. Four years ago, I was commissioned by ERC to write a legal report, together with two former judges of the European Court of Human Rights. We didn’t go into the question of sovereignty, but rather the crackdown which ensued, which for us was clearly a violation of the rights of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and protest. It was a disproportionate act of state power.

—You’ve also heard about the situation from Gonzalo Boye, who’s a good friend of yours.
—Yes. But that’s something else. Many people see him as the enemy now, since he’s involved in many matters which are…

—Sensitive?
—Sensitive, yes [he laughs].

—And he’s paying a high price for it.
—Gonzalo Boye is a lawyer who collaborates with our organization. And when they started taking steps against him, we sent a report to the Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers to complain about it, including a list of violations of his rights as a lawyer. The thing is, there’s a lack of a culture involving the practice of law, because you have to distinguish between the lawyer’s role and that of his or her clients: a lawyer has the right to speak in public, to represent their client with all legal safeguards, and a lawyer must not be penalised for this.

—Well, he has been penalised alright. They also used Pegasus spyware on him when he was carrying out his work as a lawyer.
—There is one thing I used to believe, even before Snowden’s revelations, and I continue to believe it now: if you give the police and secret services of the world these tools and technical means, there’s a danger that they’ll use them. And legal oversight never keeps up with technical development, which is incredibly fast and dynamic, and that’s a recipe for disaster. In the past, dictators didn’t have access to this technology. But now you see how China has them and they’ve pretty much perfected them. Now everyone is complaining: Xi Jinping, what a dictator! What an abuse of power! But the part that’s most worrying is digital surveillance. The worst examples need to be studied, and for me this is the worst case of all.

—What’s happening in China?
—Yes, look at how they handled the pandemic. It’s a dystopia, and I see no end to it.

—They took advantage of the pandemic.
—In the summer of 2020, at the start of the pandemic, Snowden and I spoke about how states were taking advantage of any opportunity to gain more power, to invent new techniques of control and justify them with other arguments. And I don’t deny the dangers of the pandemic, I don’t. But boosting these surveillance measures, especially in the health system, brings a permanent danger for the future.

—But Spain started spying with Pegasus before the pandemic, and this reveals a police state which keeps an entire political movement, such as Catalonia’s independence supporters, under surveillance.
—Yes. And I want to say that in order to face this danger, you need politicians, parliaments and a legal system which are aware of it, whose eyes are peeled, and that surveil the surveillers. But I don’t see that happening and I’m looking forward to discussing it in depth with Gonzalo Boye.

—Did you collaborate with Boye in the defence of the Catalans in exile?
—Well, he said something about it in his book.

—Which is why I bring it up.
—Well, I’ll say I didn’t [smiles]. If Boye claims otherwise, fine.

—What else are you working on at the moment?
—I’m the General Secretary of the European Center for Human and Constitutional Rights (ECCHR). It may not be as gripping as what I talk about in the book, but I prefer not to compare it to the value of the work I was doing back then, getting personally involved. The way I got into this line of work in Argentina was spectacular in many ways, a very emotional, very valid experience, I freed myself from the ego of the left-wing German lawyer. Working with human rights and transnational cases, I realized that it was incredibly important to establish an independent structure which didn’t depend on a single individual. And this doesn’t fit the model of the heroic, male, left-wing lawyer. There are many such people, and they do very important work. But the work seems much more sustainable to me, if we can exchange experiences with others.

—Why did you write this book about your experiences as a “heroic lawyer”?
—Jennifer Robinson, an Australian lawyer, told me that they needed other models of lawyers. It was the main motive. You see, when I started out I had no idea what would come out of it all, and I think it’s really important to have certain models, certain guidance, at the same time as you’re having your own experiences, finding your own path.

—You tell a story, a kind of journey of initiation, in which you distance yourself from this label of heroic, committed, warrior lawyer, after having gone through such brutal experiences as the lawsuits in Argentina and the case against Donald Rumsfeld, till you get to a point where you are working more as part of a team.
—Explicitly political teamwork. There are two pillars: the Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch model, who say that human rights are neutral, that they mustn’t look like a left-wing organization or take a political stance, as this will benefit them. They need to appear neutral and apolitical because these are simply human rights.

—And it shouldn’t be like that.
—It shouldn’t. Because the powerful don’t want to wield their power brutally and directly, but to exercise more subtle violence, to exercise power more subtly, using laws and lawyers. Lawyers afford you legitimacy, cover, and that’s what needs to be deconstructed. The struggle for justice and human rights is clearly a political and legal fight, that much ought to be clear. We, as an organization, aim to use the law, and our legal experience is at the heart of our work. It’s not about carrying out symbolic actions: what we do is serious, we prepare it professionally. But this is only one part of the struggle for human rights. The other part is political.

—You simultaneously engage in a political and a legal struggle.
—That’s right. And this doesn’t mean that Amnesty’s strategy, for example, is wrong. I mean that it needs to be complemented by other efforts. It’s part of the job and everyone has their role, they do their share of the work. I contradict the typical image of the fight for human rights, but also the work of the lawyer, as it’s not at all neutral or apolitical. Instead, it’s incredibly interesting, politically speaking. And in our court cases, there are parts of the job in which our work has a very strong legal basis. Our job is to prove abuses of existing laws, but it is likely that other laws will be needed, and that means it’s a political issue.

—It’s about using the law against the power structure so that the power structure ends up changing the law.
—Yes. But power exists in every relationship in society and in every relationship between individuals and groups, and I don’t want to oversimplify it. We, too, are part of the power structure, but we can use the laws in favour of the world’s marginalized people. This is something new, especially if we look at the countries in the South, where there are networks of lawyers working for NGOs, many of them staffed by young people, who work hand in hand with social movements and frontline activists.

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Junqueras will continue as president, and his second-in-command, Marta Rovira, will stay as secretary general. Both of them have been leading the party since 2011, and this will be their final term because Esquerra’s regulations does not allow them more mandates. Indeed, it is their fourth term, and the party rules allow only three, but an exception for both of them was put forward arguing that they had not been able to comply with their functions at all times. Junqueras spent three and a half years in jail and Marta Rovira has been in exile, in Switzerland, for four and a half years, in order to avoid being convicted also for the 2017 referendum in Spain.

Esquerra had only 10 seats in Parliament when Junqueras and Rovira began their leadership in 2011, and the party now boasts 33 and is governing solo over Catalonia for the first time in 89 years. Current Catalan president Pere Aragonès will continue in the party leadership too as national coordinator, while spokesperson Marta Vilalta will stay as deputy secretary general.

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