The NGO Society for Threatened Peoples, focused on defending the rights of national minorities, demands to the Spanish Kingdom to follow the recommendations of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and release the Catalan political prisoners.
This week the NGO Society for Threatened Peoples has launched a campaign to gather signatures to send a manifesto to Ms. Gyde Jensen, Chairwoman of the German Bundestag Committee for Human Rights and Humanitarian Assistance, on the situation in Catalonia. This statement calls on the German Parliament to take part in the protection of the rights of the Catalan minority, which faces political persecution from the Spanish authorities.
The campaign manifesto highlights the lack of will by the Spanish government to negotiate with its Catalan counterpart since the October 1st 2017 referendum, which was brutally repressed by the Spanish police. The Catalan civil and political leaders involved in the referendum suffered arbitrary pre-trial prison for two years before receiving draconian 9 to 13-year prison sentences.
Their democratic and peaceful efforts to consult Catalan society on the possibility to becmoe an independent state was considered sedition which, according to the organization, is a disproportionate accusation against elected politicians, and another episode in Spain’s repressive engine against national minorities.
Taking all of this into consideration, the Society for Threatened People calls on Ms. Jensen to formally request the Spanish government to comply with the recommendations of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention for the Catalan political prisoners to be released and compensated immediately for the human rights violations they have suffered. It also states the need to foster dialogue, while protecting Catalan representatives from further repression.
The organization expresses the need for both the Spanish and the Catalan governments to reach a political solution through a comprehensive political dialogue, without criminalizing the Catalan pro-independence movement and avoiding further violations of human rights. In this sense, it has also published a video in the German language to explain and denounce the above-mentioned facts.