Article 155: a digital gag rule against foreign action

One of the Catalan government programmes which the Spanish authorities have rushed to strike down after triggering Article 155 [of the Spanish Constitution] is the Public Diplomacy Council of Catalonia. This body, known as Diplocat, is the successor of the old Catalan Council for Europe and was tasked with explaining Catalonia’s reality to the public opinion abroad.

Since October 28, though, Diplocat’s management have been sacked, the internet address diplocat.cat no longer works and the institutions’s Twitter account (@Diplocat) is gone. You can’t even look up Diplocat’s activities prior to the day of its dissolution.

Spain’s discomfort over Catalonia’s projection abroad is more than well-known. Evidence of that are the biased reports which regularly appear on Spanish media about the cost of Catalonia’s “embassies”, which have also been shut down, their staff sacked and are now conspicuously absent from the Catalan government’s official website (gencat.cat)

Yet there is another piece of information from the digital world that clearly exposes the Spanish government’s eagerness to interfere with Catalonia’s visibility abroad: in the afternoon of Sunday October 1, while over two million Catalans were struggling to cast a vote [in the independence referendum], the Spanish Guardia Civil officers that had raided and taken over the Catalan government’s main IT facility (the CTTI) the day before —to interfere with the ballot management software— received a second list of IP addresses to be added to the polling stations which they were already monitoring form Catalonia’s Cybersecurity Agency. At first the Agency’s staff feared that the Spanish judge wanted to spy on any internet traffic within the Catalan government’s HQ but, soon enough, they realised that the new addresses which the State was so keen to monitor belonged to Diplocat. Someone wanted to find out who the Catalan government was in touch with abroad, and perhaps block such contacts. The fact that the Catalan embassies reported to Catalonia’s Foreign Ministry and not to Diplocat was irrelevant. The point was to prevent the world from looking at Catalonia and seeing what was going on. This should be kept in mind now that the grassroots groups have called a massive rally in Brussels on December 7 with the slogan “Wake up, Europe. Help Catalonia”.