The president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, has asked this Tuesday the mission of the European Parliament that investigates the use of software such as Pegasus in the EU to “get to the bottom” of the Catalangate, the case of massive espionage against the independence movement revealed a year ago by Citizenlab.
In the meeting with the MEPs, Aragonés denounced that espionage is “another episode of the dirty war” of the State against the independence movement. “Some believe that the defense of the unity of Spain is above fundamental rights,” said the president of the Generalitat, asking for “the protection and response” that he has said he is not receiving from the Spanish authorities.
In turn, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Meritxell Serret, has denounced the cross-border dimension of his case, made when he resided in Belgium.
Aragonès, together with Serret and the Barcelona City Councilor Ernest Maragall, all of them spied on, have reported that the Spanish State has left the victims of espionage helpless.
Aragonès regretted, just before meeting with the mission that ends its visit to Spain today, that they have to appear before a commission of the European Parliament and cannot do so before a commission of Congress or the Senate, which he has indicated as a sign of how “the Spanish State has neglected those responsible for politics, those of us whose privacy has been violated and who have been spied on in their personal lives and in our political activity for the simple fact of defending the independence of Catalonia”.
For this reason, the president has announced that they will explain to the European Parliamentary mission “how the Spanish State has neglected the victims of espionage, how responsibilities have not been assumed and how there are still many questions to be answered about who ordered the espionage, what information was has and why we have been subjected to espionage by people who have only exercised the democratic right of passive suffrage because we have been chosen by the citizens of Catalonia”.
“We will always bet on dialogue, on negotiation, on giving a democratic solution to the conflict, and espionage should not throw us back on our convictions. It has to be the Spanish government that gives all the explanations that it has not yet given “, Aragonès has proclaimed.
