‘I feel like I’m not free,’ says minister after leaving prison

Dolors Bassa, Labour minister of the deposed Catalan government, has been out of prison for thirteen days; yet, she does not feel free. “I feel a threat hanging above me, because they can still request up to 30 years in prison,” she explained, in an interview with the Catalan News Agency (ACN).

Bassa and the rest of the Catalan government were deposed as one of the measures of Article 155, when Madrid seized Catalonia’s self-rule. Dolors Bassa, along with eight of her colleagues, was sent to prison, and was only recently afforded the option to pay bail. She is indignant, she said, that her two colleagues (vice president Oriol Junqueras and Home Affairs minister Joaquim Forn) remain incarcerated without bail, along with the two civil society leaders Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart.