The Catalan National Assembly (ACN) has sent a communication to the director of Europol, the European Union Agency for Cooperation in Compliance with the Law, to express the entity’s concern about the content of the latest report from this body on the situation and trends in terrorism, which includes the Catalan independence movement as one of the “most active and violent” within the Spanish separatist scene.
The president of the Catalan National Assembly, Dolors Feliu, has addressed a letter to Catherine De Bolle, executive director of Europol, an EU institution that included the Basque and Catalan independence movements in its 2023 report on the situation of terrorism in Europe (TE-SAT 2023) published last month.
Feliu has conveyed the organization’s rejection of the information published, and has requested the withdrawal of criminalizing content on the Catalan independence movement.
As a result of this report, drawn up based on information provided by the member states, the Minister of the Interior, Joan Ignasi Elena, already asked Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaksa for “urgent” explanations at the beginning of the month. In a letter addressed to the minister, Elena expressed her “absolute indignation” and considered the information provided by the State to be “extremely serious”, for which she asked that responsibilities be investigated and purged and claimed that, instead of “repeatedly persecuting” the rise of the extreme right in Spain is combated against the Basque and Catalan independence movement.
Within the section “Ethno-nationalist and separatist terrorism”, the report states that “in Spain, the Catalan and Basque separatists are currently the most active and violent within the Spanish separatist scene.”
It also points out, in a section dedicated to left-wing and anarchist terrorism, that in the Basque Country and Catalonia there is an “overlapping between left-wing extremists and separatists” especially “in terms of the motivations for the attacks.”
In her letter, Dolors Feliu has highlighted the non-violent nature of the contemporary Catalan independence movement, which “defends the right to self-determination of Catalonia through democratic means and initiatives protected within the framework of the rights of freedom of association, freedom of expression and political participation.
