Protest held marking four months in jail for grassroots leaders

The centre of Barcelona filled up with pro-independence supporters on Friday evening as thousands of people took to the streets to protest the imprisonment of jailed Catalan leaders. Specifically, the occasion marked four months in jail of the grassroots activists Jordi Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart.

With lights shining from their mobiles, people marched from Plaça de Sant Jaume, where the Barcelona City Council is located, all the way to La Model prison near Sants train station. The destiny of the demonstration was symbolic. La Model was only recently closed, but during the Franco regime it became synonymous with the dictator’s repression, where torture was a regular occurrence, and where many political opponents found themselves.

On October 16, Spain’s National Court preemptively imprisoned Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart, the presidents of two civil society organizations that had a leading role in calling mass pro-independence demonstrations in recent years. Spain’s Attorney General—who filed the charges in the first place—accused them of urging protesters to block a police operation aimed at thwarting the logistics of the forthcoming October 1 referendum.

The head of Amnesty International in Europe, Gauri van Gulik, recently called for the immediate release of the jailed Catalan leader, Jordi Sànchez, who has been in prison for nearly four months. He was arrested alongside Jordi Cuixart, the president of the civic organisation Òmnium Cultural, as part of an investigation into the independence process, and the alleged related crime of sedition in the run up to the October 1 referendum. Van Gulik termed these possible charges as unjust, stating that they should be dropped.