Often, we in the Catalan-American community have the difficult task of trying to contextualize and explain the complex and fast-changing story in Catalonia to our Americans friends and colleagues. The information that makes the transatlantic jump to the US is sporadic, and leads to a passive consumption of events. Most importantly, it prevents many from seeing what is becoming an increasingly worrying human rights situation in Catalonia, complete with arrests, detentions, exile, censure and just this week, hunger strikes.

How to get this information across? The best analogy that helps unpack this is to imagine a puzzle. Then imagine you are a well-informed American who broadly takes in news from across the globe. As the news media tunes you in to Catalonia, periodically, each puzzle piece represents an individual story of incarceration, of harassment, of a crackdown on expression or assembly. In sharing individual pieces that are spread out over time, one doesn’t see the entire picture, the completed puzzle. Rather, you see a series of what you imagine must be isolated or rare incidents. Most are rectified, either by prosecutors, the police themselves, or in the courts, you assume.

Now, admittedly, you’ve already seen some of the pieces, they’re the obvious ones. Let’s call them corner pieces. For those following politics and international relations, Catalonia was very much on the radar last year because of the referendum on independence. Declared illegal (ignoring an amendment to the Penal Code in 2005 that decriminalized participation in a referendums, authorized or not), authorities sent more than 10,000 national and militarized police to stop the vote from moving forward. If you were paying attention to this event, you would have also seen the scenes of violence perpetrated by security forces on unarmed civilians. This is our first corner piece.

Maybe you were also aware that half of Catalonia’s previously-elected government and two of Catalonia’s most prominent civil society leaders are incarcerated and currently languishing in pre-trial detention, charged with armed rebellion, charges which legal experts view as unfounded. If you’re particularly engaged, you’ll be aware that, not only are there former government leaders in jail, but that the former president of the Catalan parliament is also incarcerated, for allowing debate on the question of Catalonia’s political future in parliament. Let’s call these our second and third corner pieces.

Finally, the other half of Catalonia’s former government is currently living in exile across Europe. They live freely and openly in Belgium and in Switzerland and in the United Kingdom, as no European government has yet to agree with the Spanish justice system that they be returned to Spain to face charges for rebellion. This is our final corner piece.

But beyond the headlines and consequences related to the referendum, there lies a deeper, more subtle but no less insidious story. This story affects people who aren’t on the front lines of politics or leadership. They come from all walks of life. They’re local activists, or teachers, or mechanics or even clowns (yes, clowns). They are charged with crimes such as rebellion, sedition, or support for terrorism, all carrying decades of potential jail time. Some charges go forward, other are eventually dropped. They send the message regardless.

Outside of Catalonia, Spanish justice has been similar — rappers condemned for terrorism for their lyrics, tweets about a long dead Francoist prime minister prosecuted and convicted (recently reduced ‘only’ to a one year suspended sentence), bar fights become terrorist threats. These are the middle pieces, the more difficult pieces to place in the mosaic. They’re stories which many of us follow closely, but outside the community they often goes unnoticed.

If you’re still only seeing the individual pieces, perhaps you’ll think I’m exaggerating. “It can’t be, this is Spain, not (insert country, Iran! Burma! China!),” you might say. To help fill our puzzle in, then, perhaps you’ll need other voices. Take Amnesty’s word about the incarceration of the civil society activists, or Human Rights Watch’s word on the excessive police violence during the referendum. Or take FreeMuse’s (which defends artistic freedom) 2018 study which identified Spain as having more artists incarcerated than any other country, ahead of Iran and China. Or refer yourself to the World Organisation Against Torture or the International Association of Democratic Lawyers or Frontline Defenders or the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of expression and opinion, on their objections to the political prisoners’ incarceration and privation of rights.

You can take the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s objection to electronic censorship in Catalonia, or the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe’s concerns on the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly. Or take the American Political Science Association’s strongly worded condemnation (or the Canadian Political Science Association’s if you prefer) of the prosecution of Catalan election monitors.

Finally, you can take the word of the New York Times’ Editorial Board, which summed up the most infamous of Spain’s repressive laws (nicknamed the ‘gag law’) by saying it had ‘no place in a democratic nation, where Spaniards, as citizens of the European Union, have more than a virtual right to peaceful, collective protest.’

In sum, only armed with all of the pieces to the puzzles do we begin to see the big picture. Once assembled, we see that it is a worrying one, and one which we at the Catalonia America Council will be working to shed light on over the course of 2019.

Today, as we celebrate 70 years since the Human Rights Declaration was consecrated, we see backsliding in many parts of the world. In that context, those that are most active in exercising their rights, and most vocal about protecting them when violated, are also on the front lines of the backlash against it. The political and civil society leaders, the activists and front-line defenders of freedom of expression and assembly in Catalonia need our help, they deserve our support.

Please join our campaign, #StandwithCatalonia, and donate what you can, so that we can work to highlight this issue with key stakeholders, political and business leaders, think tanks and educators, and journalists and writers across the country.