Opinion
Cause célèbre
Mark Nayler
...the UN's advice about Catalonia; nevertheless, it's a fashionable "cause célèbre" with which to associate one's name. Whatever their motivations, these apparently concerned onlookers are right to object to the incarceration of nine Catalan ... public office for two years, not thrown in a cell. In posing a series of complex questions, the manifesto also makes you consider both sides of the Catalonia argument. It says, for example, that Madrid denies "the right to self-determination" of ... Catalonia. Is this a "right"? It is according to the second section of Spain's 1978 Constitution, but anti-separatists point to the same sentence of that document, which also asserts the "indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation". The right to "self
