Facing the political conflict: more democracy, more self-determination

The main political leaders of the Self-Determination Referendum will be judged on these trials. They have been in preventive prison during the last year and a half, and now they are facing imprisonment for 30 years. Others went in exile and the Belgian, German and Scottish courts have rejected the Spanish accusations described in the European Arrest Warrants submitted by the Spanish state. The Swiss justice did the same.

But Catalonia and their people continue to see how their right to decide their future in freedom is always refused. The Catalan people is witnessing how a fundamental right recognised by the Charter of Human rights of the United Nations and by the Charter of civil and political rights is being denied. All peoples have the right to self-determination and this is not just a democratic civil and political right, but also a mechanism of prevention of conflicts.

During the last one and a half years the citizens of Catalonia have seen how important rights have been violated as a result of the determination of the Spanish state apparatus and their political authorities to use repressive and judiciary ways. Imprisonments, exiles and confinements affecting also grassroots political activists; thousands of persons under investigation – between them hundreds of Majors and 136 people arrested; the more usual police and fascist violence; and the serious attacks against the Catalan parliamentary system – which finally represent also attacks against the same constitutional architecture of the Spanish state. All these elements are political, social instability and conflict factors, issues that only could be addressed from a perspective: more democracy, more social, labor and political justice.

We have to return the voice to the people without fear and prevention. Only the perspective of exercising the right to self-determination in a scenario of absence of violations of rights can be the guarantee of a negotiated final of this democratic conflict created by the Spanish state. One state where the apparatus, forty years later, continues to be dominated by a Francoism who has not disappeared but continues to manage, from the shadow, from the courts and from a power ideology, who only the popular participation and empowerment can have the capacity to stop.

Self-determination is not a crime!!