“Spain versus Catalonia: Inventory of a national persecution in the European Union’ is an archive with more than 1,000 entries since 2003 compiling the legal cases against Catalans who were exercising their basic political rights of demonstration, expression and representation.
These figures demonstrate that rule of law violations in Spain against Catalonia is both systemic and systematic. And it is futile: no legal persecution can change the reality, although it does change the positions of many political leaders.
This index of repression was assembled by Clara Ponsatí’s team in the European Parliament over the course of two years. It began as a schematic timeline of the cases open against Catalan activists and politicians with the goal of providing quality information for the reports on rule of law violations that the EU periodically issues. However, given the vast amount of information, it has ended up becoming a complex archive of legal cases and rights violations.
The cases documented here have been examined by jurists, journalists and political scientists to ensure that they offer truthful, concise, clear information. They have been catalogued following archival criteria, which combine chronological order, thematic indexes and contextual interrelations among the cases. The goal is for the archive to be user-friendly for both everyday citizens and scholars in this field.