Pablo Hasél had promised not to go in silence and kept his word.
Spanish rapper, who was imprisoned this week has caused violent riots and a political row within the coalition government led by the Spanish Socialists, was barrel Monday at the University of the Catalan city of Lleida.
In one of his last tweets Before police entered campus and tied him up to start a nine-month sentence, Hasel called on supporters to continue “denouncing those guilty of having fucked up so many lives.”
His words seem to have come home. In cities across the country, crowds of protesters have burned property and wrapped objects every day in police to undo their anger over the rapist’s “kidnapping”.
The case of Hasel, jailed on Tuesday for extolling terrorism in his letters and tweets, has also brought to light a deep division in the country’s freedom of expression and democratic values.
As mostly young protesters are outraged by his sentence, the case forces the government to finally confront some of the country’s laws and its justice system, which is accused of playing an increasingly reactionary role in society. and politics.
The Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, acknowledged on Friday that Spanish democracy had to do “when it comes to expanding and improving the protection of freedom of expression.” But, he added, “In a full democracy, there is no place for any kind of violence and there are no exceptions.”
Despite the protests, in which it was reported that a young woman lost her eye to a foam bullet from the police and attacked the offices of the newspapers of El Periódico de Catalunya, many people in Spain support the imprisonment of Hasél .
They say their lyrics and tweets are an unacceptable humiliation of the victims of terrorism and incite hatred against the police and the former king of the country. In convicting him, the judges argued that the violence of his words could translate into violence on the ground, and conservatives point to the consequences of his arrest to prove the point.
However, for many others, including people who consider Hasel’s letters very serious, his imprisonment is the most extreme example of a worrying sign that the Spanish judicial system is punishing people not for what they have done. , but from what they have said, sung, tweeted. or drawn.
Amnesty International and Spanish celebrities such as Javier Bardem and Pedro Almodóvar claim that Hasél’s sentence – and other imprisonments – have a gruesome effect on freedom of expression.
A week before Hasél’s imprisonment, Pablo Iglesias, the leader of the left-wing Podemos party and one of four Spanish deputy prime ministers, suggested that the country had not completely turned the page on the far-right dictatorship from 1939 to 1975: “It is obvious that Spain does not have a situation of political and democratic normalcy,” he said.
A Saturnian figure who seems older than his 32 years, Hasél (real name Pablo Rivadulla Duro), might seem an unlikely figure to be shown in graffiti and murals throughout Spain. Modeled on the pioneers of Spanish rap with political aggression, such as Kase O, he is a name famous less for his art than for his well-publicized brushes with the law since 2011.
He is now serving his first prison sentence, but in the past has been tried several times for tweets and letters. He was also sentenced to a two-and-a-half-year separate sentence for threatening to kill a man in a bar and a six-month sentence for assaulting a television journalist during a press conference in 2016.
Some of Hasel’s verbal attacks depict former King Juan Carlos I of Spain as a “mafia boss” who has met with Saudi tyrants. Diatribes against police claim they “sow racism” and “murder with impunity.” These tweets were considered to have failed in the Spanish penal code which criminalizes “insulting” the crown and the police.
For this, Hasel was sentenced to pay a heavy fine. But it is the lyrics and tweets that allude appropriately to terrorist figures who carry the much more serious charge of “glorifying terrorism” and who eventually earned Hásel a prison sentence.
“I don’t care about the bullet in the back of my neck, pepero,” is an example of this feeling, discussed in a previous trial. Appeal is a nickname for those who support the Spanish center-right popular party, several members of which were assassinated by the Basque terrorist group Eta in the 1990s.
Hasél is not the only rapper that Spanish judges have considered opportune to imprison and punish with similar charges: in 2018 the Mallorcan musician known as Valtònyc received a prison sentence due to some of his lyrics and escaped to Belgium one day before the due date to enter prison.
Other arts figures have also been found at the end of the penal code in recent years, a situation of deep concern to the international arts advocacy group Freemuse.
Srirak Plipat, the director of the Denmark-based organization, said: “I think freedom of expression in Spain has fallen in the last ten years.”
This deterioration that Plipat claims to have occurred may be a significant factor in understanding why the Hasel case is causing this discomfort.
A decade ago, Spain was still deeply affected by the global financial downturn. In 2011, youth unemployment was approaching 50%. Anti-austerity measures and general contempt for Spanish political culture triggered the May 15 (15M) movement, which launched Podemos and Iglesias ’career. Its young members occupied places throughout Spain.
In 2012, Catalonia took over from Basque separatism as the new fault line in the unstable unity of Spain. The Catalan movement to secede from Spain culminated in the 2017 illegal independence referendum in Catalonia, during which people were filmed by police beatings while trying to vote.
During the same period, a flood of royal scandals damaged the popularity of the monarchy. The revelation that King John Charles I had gone elephant hunting with his lover in Botswana while Spain was languishing in the misery of the austerity era provoked widespread outrage. The revered royal year he was forced to abdicate in favor of his son in 2014.
At this time, Iglesias coined the term “caste” to describe the establishment of political parties, large business interests, and judges. The term was adopted by the followers of the 15M, and the “caste”, clinging to the ancient certainties of the monarchy and a united Spain, began to feel the heat.
Last year this pressure intensified following the bomb allegation that Juan Carlos had received setbacks in Saudi Arabia for a total of $ 100 million (£ 70 million).
According to Plipat and other advocates of free speech, these crises caused conservative judges and politicians to begin using free speech laws to curb the torrent of tweeted anger.
Plipat notes that judges began using the glorification of the terrorism charge more frequently from 2015 onwards.
David Canales, an investigator at Amnesty International’s Madrid office, also says conservative lawmakers toughened sentences related to the exaltation of terrorism that same year: “Those 2015 reforms were clearly enacted in response to all this. social mobilization and all that activism “.
The appearance of Hasél, an anti-monarchist Catalan of the extreme left as a symbol of the whole country, is not so much because of what he says or expresses, but because it represents the logical conclusion of this law and repression.
With their crude references to terrorist victims, Hasél and Valtònyc can be considered atypical. But since 2015, much softer forms of expression have made people go to court. The judicial environment has created what Canales calls a dangerous “deterrent effect.”
Guille Martínez-Vela, editor of the Spanish satirical magazine El Jueves, knows too much about the threat of being hit by the penal code. In 2017, when thousands of additional police officers were sent to Catalonia in the run-up to the illegal referendum, its publication joked that riot police had blown up all of the region’s cocaine supply.
Although the police’s alleged fondness for drugs is a comic trope in Spain, Martínez-Vela was reported by the national police and summoned to a hearing.
Police argued the joke provoked anti-police hatred. Martinez-Vela said hate speech laws were designed to protect minorities, not a powerful, state-backed collective. The charges were eventually dropped.
But Martínez-Vela was moved by the experience: “When I now draw or write a joke for the magazine, I am always thinking‘ how would I defend this before a judge? ‘… that’s the creepy effect: idea that if you joke about the police, they can take you to court.’
There are many other examples, including in 2017, when a student, Cassandra Vera, received a suspended prison sentence for tweeting a joke about the assassination of Eta by the last prime minister who served under Franco in 1973, and in 2016 a gang of puppeteers faced criminal charges for allegedly exalting Eta in a production on Madrid Street. Vera’s sentence was later reversed by the Spanish supreme court, while the puppeteers were eventually acquitted.
But there are indications that there could be a change of government, which last week announced plans to amend the law so that “verbal excesses committed in the context of artistic, cultural or intellectual acts” would not result in prison sentences.
A government spokeswoman said she wanted to “provide a much safer framework for freedom of expression”. Podemos wants to go further with changes that completely modify or suppress the glorification of terrorism clauses.
Even advocates of change can be found in the judiciary. A Spanish judge in office, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, said: “The mentality of some judges is very conservative, they have ideas that are not progressive on fundamental rights … and this leads to these interpretations. .
“I think other people in general [in the judiciary] I agree that these laws need to be changed. For me, the limit on freedom of speech should only be when there is a direct message to go out and hurt someone. “
The judge did not justify that a rap lyrics would ever need a prison sentence. “I think it’s absolutely disproportionate. We put it on the same level as stabbing someone ”.
For the judge, the Hasél case raises profound questions about Spanish society and its relationship with the monarchy.
“Perhaps we have very fragile institutions and there is a tendency to overprotect them. Mature societies, after all, can deal with such criticism without having to go to court. ”