Eh… I mean, there’s nothing undemocratic about the notion that you can’t commit treason.
You aren’t allowed to overthrow a democratic government if it doesn’t do what you want. You aren’t allowed to just break the law.
As long as you are still allowed to voice your opinions, and participate in the Democratic process, it’s fine. If you step outside the legal framework and break laws to try and overthrow the government, then that’s going to be illegal in any functional system of government.
Yep, pretty much.
Finally had some time to read excerpts of the sentence (it’s 500 pages long). It’s interesting because it points out to a legal vacuum in the Spanish penal code.
The argument to reject the rebellion and/or treason charges (which would have been much more stiff) boils down that, despite what they said at the time, the action was not for reals and that it had no chance of actually succeeding, besides the level of violence not being high enough. There was a strong push by the government to try to avoid these charges, I believe, and the Spanish right wing is angry at the supossed leniency of the court. They are calling for the non-violent rebellion to be added to the legal code (it’s not going to happen -and it’s ridiculous-, it’s all part of pre campaign political maneovering). Now, the sedition charge is also interpretative because of the relative lack of violence and probably the legal solution is to make disobedience to court (which here is pretty much beyond question) a much harsher crime.
In many ways it’s a Solomonic sentence bound to displease everybody. Not hard enough for the Spanish nationalists who are really taking this to the extreme (wait until the government removes Franco from its tomb in the coming weeks for peak right-wing indignation), too extreme for the Catalonian nationalists who think law should not apply to their dear leaders, and pretty much innefective since they will be going to Catalonian prisons, under the Catalonian prison regime, controlled by the Catalonian, independentist government they were members of. So they will be granted furlough pretty much inmediatedly (the specific law is a minimum of 8 hours a day in prison) and it means they will sleep in prison and will have a good political talking point with a lot of personal and political freedom.
Edit: imo, this take by the Guardian explains the political situation really well and succinctly. I find myself agreeing to everything here:
This is one of the responses to that tweet:
I don’t know if that is police overreaction or not. I can’t tell what those people were doing off-camera when the police arrived. But this other video, of the rioting and destruction by the protesters, is even worse.
Yeah, that’s bad, and looks totally unnecessary.
Oh, there’s police overreaction and the first video can possibly be that (it looks like it, certainly).
But there are also several thousand violent protesters out there and its disingenuous to point only towards one side, specially since, justified or not in their execution and targets, police charges tend to be tied to street violence. The most critical injury (so far) this week is a policeman, who is in critical condition, although several demonstrator had very serious injuries too, some of them losing sight in one eye.
At this point all violence is suspect. The police becuse they have a history of overreaction in Catalonia, and the protesters because there’s organized violence on that side and no organized protest against such violence, so the statement of “we condemn all violence” rings somewhat hollow. I do believe they did lose control of their radicalized elements, more than a conscious orchestration, though.
Oh, and another thing to take into account is that the police response is partially organized by the Catalonian, independentist, government. The same one that supports the protests.
It’s a mess without an easy way out at this point, I’m afraid. Support for independence needs to rise significantly or go away significantly (like happened in the Basque country) before things can normalize. Right now there’s too much division. At least the non-independentist have not radicalized yet, at least in numbers, so we are not seeing demonstrators clashing against each other. But I’m afraid that might change.
During 10+ days of protests and civil disobedience and violence here in Ecuador, there was a good deal of social media about violent reactions / abuses by police. They were accused of, among other things, throwing two young men off a highway bridge to their deaths. It turns out that almost none if it is true; those two men tried to use the outside ledge of the bridge to get past a barricade, but slipped and fell. There are at this point no credible reports of violence by the police.
Meanwhile protestors broke into and burned several government offices, and someone stole a bunch of the documentary evidence of corruption by prior government officials currently under investigation.
By far the worst of it was in Quito. There, the mainly peaceful protests by the rural people seem to have been used by pro-Correa activists as cover for a lot of destruction, including firebombs, arson, and physical destruction of buildings, walls, other public structures. In Guayaquil it was mostly people looting consumer products under the guise of protesting.
Here in Cuenca, my own impression was that the police were quite restrained. There was some tear gas when the protestors began to do damage to public buildings, but no police assaults, no shooting, etc.
I mean, riot police here is certainly something. Of course I would not want to be in their situation either, but I do think police should be kept to a higher standard that certainly is not always there.
Some of the videos are inexcusable, and sadly it’s unlikely many of those involved will face sanctions, but this week we saw demonstrations every day, in many different places, so you ought to look at the frequency of abuse to see if it’s isolated incidents or systematic (I have no answer to this until an investigation is undertaken, something I doubt will happen).
But there’s a LOT of propaganda going out, from both sides, so everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt (for example, violent protesters are probably in the low thousands, so a minority of those in the streets).