The president of Catalonia, Quim Torra, has written to the newly returned speaker of the Spanish Congress, Meritxell Batet, and the Spanish government's delegate to Catalonia, Teresa Cunillera, to inform them he won't attend the Constitution Day ceremony in the parliament in Madrid for "strictly political and ethical reasons".

"It's in the name of the Spanish Constitution, interpreted in the most restrictive manner possible, that people who have a different political project to the unity of the kingdom of Spain are being persecuted. They are being persecuted, they are being imprisoned and they are being forced into exile to impose a unity which is no longer voluntary but obligatory," he writes.

Torra says that the Constitution "no longer represents the majority of us as Catalans". As such, he says, they are "determined to write ourselves a new one, more modern, more democratic and more just".

6th December is an annual public holiday in Spain, Constitution Day, celebrating the anniversary of the 1978 referendum in which the current Constitution was approved during the transition to democracy after the Franco dictatorship.