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Pro-Independence parties win Catalan elections
Jordi Oriola Folch    Off_Guardian , 17 February 2021
off-guardian.org/2021/02/16/pro-independence-parties-win-catalan-elections/


For the third time in a row, the Catalan pro-independence movement wins with an absolute majority in the Catalan elections. It has won resoundingly with 74 seats, more than the 68 that establishes the majority (in the previous elections it had won with 70). This time also with 51.22% of the votes, making it the majority among the voters.

The elections were due next year, but they were brought forward because the Spanish courts overthrew Catalan President Joaquim Torra for having disobeyed an electoral board that ordered him to take down a banner criticising the imprisonment of Catalan politicians. The President refused, citing freedom of expression, and the Spanish judiciary considered that the contempt was sufficient to force the removal of the President of the Parliament of Catalonia and cause the elections to be brought forward.

Furthermore, after consulting experts on the pandemic, the provisional Catalan executive decided to postpone the elections for five months until the third wave of Covid-19 had subsided. However, yet again, the Spanish judiciary interfered forcing the elections to be held on 14th February.

This is the same Spanish Justice that keeps 9 Catalan politicians and activists in prison, that has issued search and arrest warrants against 7 exiled Catalan politicians (which the German and Belgian courts rejected because they did not see the accusations as justified or because they understood that there were no guarantees of a fair trial in Spain), it is the same Spanish Justice that maintains the search and arrest warrant against a Majorcan musician –exiled in Belgium– for singing against the King of Spain and that is imminently going to imprison another Catalan musician, Pablo Hasel, for also having sung against the King.

In this context, and despite having the entire state apparatus and the Spanish press against them, independence has won again, and has done so obtaining a larger absolute majority than ever and with over 51% of the votes. In front of the pro-independence movement, we have the former Spanish socialist health minister during the pandemic, who has had the full support of the state, the press and unionism in general, and also the Spanish extreme-right of VOX, which has burst onto the Catalan Parliament with 11 seats.

Given this scenario, the Spanish state and the European Union cannot deny the right of self-determination of Catalan society, which must be expressed in a referendum with democratic guarantees, transparency and without foul play.

All in all, democracy is about allowing citizens to decide at the ballot box, not about violating their will with the application of laws that should in fact serve to guarantee there is a framework that respects what societies want for themselves.

Jordi Oriola i Folch is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and founder of Transforma Films. His work has been broadcast on television stations around the world and touches on issues of human rights, sustainability, democratic participation and community work, historical memory and the economic crisis. He has also taught audiovisual classes in the Basque Country, Catalonia, South America and Africa. He can be reached through his website or twitter.



https://english.elpais.com/society/2021-02-08/spain-approaches-end-of-phase-1-of-covid-vaccination-campaign.html

El Pais - PABLO LINDE
Madrid - 08 FEB 2021 
Spain approaches end of phase 1 of Covid vaccination campaign

Spain’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign is entering the final stages of the process of immunizing residents of senior residences, while the majority of healthcare workers have also received their first jab – many have also got the second. Meanwhile, the final part of this first phase, inoculating adults with need for daily assistance even if they are not in residential care, has begun in the Canary Islands, Murcia and Navarre. This process is expected to get going in the rest of the country before the middle of February.

EL PAÍS has collected statistics in an attempt to take a snapshot of where the vaccination process has got to in Spain and these are the principal conclusions. Despite a year having passed since the first coronavirus infections having been detected in the country, the system for collecting data on the health crisis is still deficient. The Health Ministry has not centralized the collection of information on the vaccination process and just 11 of the country’s 17 autonomous regions have supplied sufficiently detailed figures.
The process is both complex and flexible. The first three groups in phase 1 of the campaign overlap in order to optimize the process, and so that it continues without pause. Healthcare workers started receiving the vaccine before the process finished in senior residences, and adults with need for daily assistance will start being immunized before all healthcare staff have had their doses.

Along the same lines, some regions are already planning for the over-80s – who are the first group in phase 2 – to start the process before phase 1 has finished. There are around 380,000 adults with need for daily assistance, and they are a complicated group to vaccinate given that home visits are often needed. It could be more efficient to vaccinate non-dependent seniors at the same time – this group is made up of 2.8 million people and accounts for six in every 10 Covid deaths in Spain. In January of this year, more than 1,300 people over the age of 80 died every week with the disease.

To complicate the situation further, not all of the approved vaccines are going to be administered to everyone. The AstraZeneca vaccines, which will start arriving in Spain this week, will only be given to people aged between 18 and 55, given that this is the group where clinical trials have proved it to be effective. For now, the Health Ministry has decided that it will be used to immunize healthcare workers who are not on the front line, and next week a decision will be made on which section of the population to prioritize – it could be essential workers or young people with underlying health conditions.
This, in effect, is what some regions are already doing. It is not completely clear which healthcare workers are being immunized in phase 1, and in many cases, the authorities have opted to give all staff in hospitals their doses, independently of their role. In Madrid, for example, a higher percentage of healthcare workers have received the second dose of the vaccine than among seniors who live in residences. This is despite the fact that senior residences – where more than half of official Covid deaths took place in Spain, according to the Health Ministry’s figures – were the absolute priority of the central government’s vaccination plan.

That said, the available data suggests that immunity is not far off for residents of the country’s senior residences. With the information supplied by the regions, nearly all residents and staff have got their first dose, and the majority of regions have administered the second dose to more than half of the recipients.

The process in residences is being delayed due to outbreaks in some of these centers. According to regional health departments consulted by EL PAÍS, this is not presenting a problem given that the process is simply being postponed where there is a high number of people infected.
Data supplied last week by the Catalan regional authorities show that the vaccines are starting to have an effect, and that number of new infections is rising less inside such residences compared to outside. Fernando Simón, the director of the Health Ministry’s Coordination Center for Health Alerts (CCAES), also said on Thursday that outbreaks in these centers are falling and that comparisons made by the ministry between the over-65s who live in residences and those who do not show a lower infection rate among the former.

The full protection offered by the vaccines, however, does not arrive until a week after the second dose. With the extreme levels of transmission that are currently being seen in Spain – the 14-day cumulative number of coronavirus cases per 100,000 inhabitants is around 750 – it is no surprise that the virus is finding its way into senior residences during this process, infecting inhabitants, and even claiming the lives of those who have been inoculated. The risk after the first shot is low, but it still exists.
The latest data from the Health Ministry shows that all regions have administered more than 70% of the doses that they have received. The authorities insist that the problem now will not be the capacity to deliver the vaccines, but rather the number that Spain will receive. From this weekend onward, that number will rise, with, for example, AstraZeneca sending 1.8 million doses this month. And it will go up even more in March, which is when a new vaccine – from Janssen – may be added to the list. The vaccination process for adults with need for daily assistance even if they are not in residential care will be a good means to measure the agility of the system.
With reporting by María Sosa, Isabel Valdés and Lucía Bohórquez.
English version by Simon Hunter.









Leftinspain
I am a  bit of an anomaly, a British  migrant, an expat if you like,   living in Spain, who sees life from a left point of view.

Civil liberties in Spain? The clampdown against the Catalan independence movement

14/10/2019

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www.counterfire.org/articles/opinion/20605-civil-liberties-in-spain-catalonia

The sentences handed out to the Catalan leaders shows the lengths the Spanish state will go to to maintain its control of Catalonia, argues Chris Bambery
October 14, 2019 

​The Supreme Court of Spain has sentenced nine Catalan pro-independence leaders to between 9 to 13 years in jail for sedition

Former vice president Oriol Junqueras, an elected member of the European and Spanish Parliaments, will serve 13 years behind bars, with former ministers Jordi Turull, Raül Romeva and Dolors Bassa getting 12 year sentences. They were all found guilty of sedition and misuse of funds for their role in the 2017 referendum push.

The former Speaker of the Catalan Parliament, Carme Forcadell, was sentenced to 11 and a half years for sedition. Former ministers Joaquim Forn and Josep Rull were convicted of the same time, getting 10 and a half years each, while civic activists Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart being sentenced to 9 years each, also for sedition.

They are all also barred from office for as many years, and their joint sentence adds up to some 99.5 years in jail.

These are harsh sentences. Sanchez and Cuixart have already been held for two years in preventative detention and seven others for well over year.

There was never going to be clemency from the Spanish state regarding the 12 Catalan civic and political leaders charged with rebellion and sedition in connection with the 1 October 2017 Catalan independence referendum.

A visit to the hearing at the Spanish Supreme Court left you with the understanding that behind the legal niceties and the façade of normality you were witnessing a political trial. This was after all a political issue, the right of Catalans to exercise the right to self-determination, and political charges, rebellion and sedition cannot be apolitical. Spain’s highest court was deciding on a political question which cannot be resolved in a judicial manner.

But it was obvious in the last few days there would be no other outlook than heavy prison sentences. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, issues statements clearly saying Catalonia would never be able to hold an independence referendum and that he was ready to push aside Catalan autonomy and impose direct rule from Madrid. Even Spain’s support for Turkey’s military assault on the Kurds showed, to quote an English football chant, “no-one likes us, but we don’t care”. It was also buttressing up support in Spain for a hard line towards Catalan aspirations.

That the Supreme Court did not find the defendants guilty of rebellion is not a surprise or a sign of leniency. Spain failed to extradite Catalan President Carles Puigdemont from Germany because a court there would not rule in favour of that charge. By ditching the rebellion charge the court grasped it could not stick in a Belgian, Scottish or Swiss court but by finding the defendants guilty of sedition they might then use that to re-open extradition requests for Puigdemont and other exiled Catalan leaders.

Repeatedly in covering this trial I have tried to explain two simple things. Firstly, the Spanish state is based on Castilian nationalism which cannot countenance any possibility of a granting the Catalans or Basques self-determination. Secondly, from the beginning Castilian nationalism has always required an “other” to demonise whether it be Muslims or Jews at its very outset, the Basques in the 1980s and 1990s and today the Catalans.

For what these sentences are saying to the Catalans is “you won’t like this, but we don’t care.” Support for independence is finely balanced but support in Catalonia for the prisoners is overwhelming. It is obvious that this verdict is going to drive greater numbers of Catalans towards the conclusion Madrid could not care less about their democratic rights.

Dropping the guilty verdict on the rebellion charges does not break with the narrative of the prosecution echoed by the Spanish media and politicians that 1 October 2017 and the days leading up to it saw a violent attempt in Catalonia to subvert the Spanish constitution and the rule of law.

As the Catalan paper El Nacional points out:

“Sedition, as defined in Spanish law, is different to how we understand the word in general English. It means the court has found them guilty of “rising up publicly and tumultuously” against the law and/or the authorities.”

Yet those who were in Catalonia on 1 October 2017, including a host of parliamentary and legal observers from Europe and beyond, witnessed no violence on the part of Catalans trying to vote. Instead they saw the para-military Spanish Civil Guards and National Police smashing their way into polling stations, beating those queuing to vote or non-violently defending the places of voting and in cases using plastic bullets.

Two of those found guilty, Jordi Cuixart, president of the cultural organisation Omnium, and Jordi Sanchez, president of the pro-independence Catalan National Assembly, have been jailed because they supposedly incited crowds gathered to protest at Spanish police raiding government ministries in the build up to the referendum. In fact, videos freely available on social media shows them calming the crowd and asking them to disperse, which they did, to avoid violence.

Both have always repeatedly stated their commitment to non-violence, as have the other prisoners, to no avail.

Of course, this case will now go to the European Court of Justice and many believe it will overturn the sentences – the charge of sedition does not still exist in Western European democracies. But that could take up to seven years. Carme Forcadell would be 70 by then. Her principle act of “sedition” was as Speaker allowing the Catalan Parliament to debate independence, something a majority of its members desired.

I have visited her in jail and helped organise her visit in 2017 to the British House of Commons where she met the Speaker, John Bercow, who greeted her from the Speaker’s chair at the opening of the session. Since then he has told the House of Commons it is inconceivable such a charge could be brought to court in Britain and was quoted as such by Forcadell’s defence team.

Jordi Cuixart who I have visited in prison and whose partner, Txell Bonnet, whose just had their second child, visited the British Parliament to meet with MPs and Peers, He is one of the most impressive people I have ever met who is vigorous in insisting on non-violence.

Former foreign affairs minister, Raül Romeva, was another visitor to Westminster and a former MEP in the Green group. Sharply dressed and sharp minded was my judgement of him.

I have only had a snatched and shouted conversation over the shoulders of Court officials with Oriol Junqueras, but he is deeply religious and its hard to see how his Christian beliefs sit with the way the Supreme Court has portrayed him as a man of violence seeking a violent break with Spain.

That these and the other five will serve such sentences is almost inconceivable but it is, tragically, what I expected.

There are already protests on the streets of Catalonia. Across Europe they need to be supported with protests outside Spanish embassies and consulates of not just the Catalan community but by citizens of every European country.

Regarding the European Union the simple truth is that if this was Iran, Russia or Turkey there would not just be strong words of protest but sanctions. In the case of Spain, I expect – nothing. If that is the case it speaks volumes to the commitment of EU leaders to human rights.

This must be the biggest civil liberties issue in recent European history. The Catalan parliament voted to hold a referendum to decide on independence but was repeatedly blocked by the Spanish government. They held an indicative one – it was ignored in Madrid. Eventually they held a full referendum which was subject to a violent attack on the democratic process by the Spanish state. When it voted for independence the Catalan Parliament voted for a declaration of independence but did not act on it because they still hoped for dialogue. Dialogue didn't but repression did. Spain is now driving Catalans towards the exit door but hey, “no one likes us but we don’t care.”


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    I am a  bit of an anomaly, a British  migrant, an expat if you like,   living in Spain, who sees life from a left point of view. 

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