Catalan National Day: free speech under threat

In the United States, the protection of
speech can be traced back to the foundation of the country, hence its prominent
and purposeful inclusion as part of the first amendment to the Constitution. Over
the course of two hundred plus years that freedom has been tested, and
political and civil society leaders from different generations – from George Washington to Frederick
Douglass to Cesar Chavez – worked to ensure the
tradition of speaking truth to power remains a pillar of the American Republic.

An opposite approach has been taken in
Spain, where current law treats peaceful protest as a public security concern,
assigns heavy fines for acts of civil disobedience and criminalizes speech online, giving security services extraordinary powers, while limiting
citizen protections.

Broadly condemned by the UN special rapporteur charged with protecting freedom of peaceful assembly, the New York
Times’ Editorial Board summed up the most infamous of recent laws restricting basic freedoms
by saying it had ‘no place in a democratic nation, where Spaniards, as citizens
of the European Union, have more than a virtual right to peaceful, collective
protest.’

As political tensions have risen between
Madrid and Barcelona over last year’s independence referendum, the restrictions
on free speech and assembly have gone into overdrive. Leaders of two of Catalonia’s largest civil society
organizations have languished
in preventative custody since October 2017 on charges of sedition, even though video evidence disproves the charges, which have been condemned internationally. And nine former members of Catalonia’s government and parliament are
also jailed, even while their colleagues who chose exile rather than
arrest – including Catalonia’s former
president Carles Puigdemont – live freely across Europe. But measures to quash basic freedoms in Catalonia have
not been aimed solely at political and civil society leadership, rather they
have targeted dissent more broadly.

But measures to quash basic freedoms in
Catalonia have not been aimed solely at political and civil society leadership,
rather they have targeted dissent more broadly, including the right to protest, debate, and
even artistic expression, with Spain recently assuming the dubious distinction
of incarcerating more artists than any country in the world. In the same vein, Amnesty International released a report this year
which details the abuse of counter-terrorism laws to restrict
expression online, most
graphically symbolized by the unprecedented step of shutting down websites and apps by authorities, violating both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention
on Human Rights in the process.

Much of the justification of repression
by Spanish authorities comes in the form of comparing pro-independence leaders
and organizations to the Nazis, a spurious accusation which sadly serves as a familiar bogeyman for prominent former and current officials of both the left and the right in
Spain. Astonishingly, the consensus extends to the far-right, where in a recent
act of extraordinary irony, the far-right Spanish party Vox, writing to a German court, compared the Catalan president in exile to Hitler.

By linking those who speak out or
question the political status quo to Nazis and extremists, these otherwise
mainstream politicians have stacked the deck against any possibility of
negotiating over legitimate political demands. The Spanish judiciary meanwhile
turns the law on its head to quench dissent, in a perverse and systematic abuse
of legislative intent meant to protect speech, assembly, minorities and the
vulnerable. By weaponizing hate speech legislation,
a national minority is now cast as the extremist oppressor, and anything goes
to silence and jail its political and civil leadership.

By weaponizing hate speech legislation, a
national minority is now cast as the extremist oppressor, and anything goes to
silence and jail its political and civil leadership.

In Spain, current legislation allows for
the proscription and prosecution of dissent, which Spanish institutions have
used to criminalize what is inherently a political question. Here in the United
States, the first amendment protects speech, even speech we don’t like,
precisely because it takes interpretation out of the hands of the state and
forces it back into the public square. It encourages debate rather than
litigating it. If applied in Catalonia, incarcerated and exiled political and
civil society leaders would be able to participate openly and without fear of
retribution in social and political life, free to seek democratic solutions to
political questions.

Catalonia’s national day, which falls in
September, commemorates the loss of the War of Succession of 1714, after which
Spain moved to quash Catalonia’s centuries-old institutions and liberties. This year, for the seventh consecutive year,
a massive, peaceful march of
one million Catalans commemorated
that loss, conscious that the struggle to protect and defend those rights marks
their present as much as their past.