A/HRC/43/47/Add.2 authorities have expressly stated their commitment to advancing towards greater protection of co-official languages. 21. Notwithstanding the improvements that could be made in the use and teaching of these co-official languages, the Rapporteur’s analysis seems to forget the value of having a common language as an instrument of participation in the political community. 22. The content of section VII. C (Participation in public life) of the Report is simply unacceptable (besides being inconsistent with the positive assessment of Spain’s judiciary set forth in paragraph 23). In that section of the Report, the Rapporteur has the temerity to insinuate, without providing a shred of evidence, that the convicts’ belonging to a supposed “Catalan minority”—or, in any case, their Catalan heritage—influenced the Supreme Court decision of 14 October 2019. Once again, the Rapporteur includes a very serious accusation against the Spanish State in his Report without making even the slightest attempt at backing it up with evidence. Not a single piece of evidence, information, or argument is set forth to support this “suspicion”. On the contrary. The Rapporteur even finds himself forced to twist statements from other Special Procedures to give an air of verisimilitude to the idea that he is suggesting. Upon citing a statement by the Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression, made on 6 April 2018, the Report mentions “political figures and protesters belonging to the Catalan minority”. However, not a single reference to a “Catalan minority” appears in that statement of 6 April 2018, which does mention “political figures and protesters in Catalonia” and “members of the Catalan Government and leaders of civil society organizations”. But the Rapporteur needs to introduce this element to shoehorn into the framework of his mandate an issue that clearly falls outside it. Likewise, paragraph 68 mentions reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Commission of Jurists without providing citations, so it is impossible to confirm even the existence of such reports from these organizations denouncing the supposed criminal persecution of members of a “Catalan minority” for the mere fact of belonging to that minority. By suggesting that the imprisonment of the 12 persons to whom he refers has to do with their belonging to a supposed minority, or to the expression of certain ideas, the Rapporteur shows his ignorance of the case tried before the Supreme Court which resulted in judgment 459/2019, of 14 October. In those proceedings, it was actions—not ideas or ideologies—that were on trial. Independentist politicians have always enjoyed the right to express and to defend their ideas. Ever since the beginning of the current democratic era in the 1970s, political parties that defended the independence of certain Spanish territories have been represented in both Houses of Parliament, as well as in the regional governments, legislative chambers, and municipalities of their respective Autonomous Communities. Their representatives have been able to express their political ideas freely; the members of the current regional Government of Catalonia continue to do so. Issues of freedom of ideology and of expression aside, the Supreme Court found that the proven facts fit the legal definition of sedition, embezzlement of public funds, and contempt of Constitutional Court orders. The Supreme Court handed down a judgment on the criminal offence of sedition because it found that the convicted parties revoked, de facto, the existing constitutional order, in order to replace it with another emanating from a regional body that manifestly lacked the legal authority to do so. It was a concerted action by those who should have acted as guarantors of public order (members of the Government of Catalonia and the Speaker of the Catalan Parliament), encouraging, in connivance with other social leaders, a citizen mobilization aimed at the de facto stripping of decision-making capacities from the government and judicial authorities who are democratically legitimized by our constitutional system. This new legal order included the Act on Legal Transition, creating a Catalan Republic and overthrowing the Spanish constitutional system, and the Referendum Act, according to which, if there were more votes for independence rather than against in the final tally of that referendum’s ballots, the result would be the independence of Catalonia. The President of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe, in a letter of 2 June 2017, refused to cooperate in holding said referendum, stressing the special emphasis that the Commission placed on the need for any referendum to be held in full compliance with the Constitution and the applicable legislation. The legislative procedure to pass the Referendum and Transition Acts was carried out by imposing an interpretation of the parliamentary rules that sought exclusively to act with unprecedented speed to approve it—and, above all, to silence the voice of the parties in the Catalan Parliament that had expressed their disagreement with the 6