Jordi Cuixart

Jordi Cuixart i Navarro (born 22 April 1975) is a Catalan businessman and cultural activist. He was the president of Òmnium Cultural, a non-profit cultural organisation founded in 1961 with more than 190,000 members and 52 local branches in Catalonia, from December 2015 to February 2022.

As part of his role in the pro-independence demonstrations prior to the Catalan independence referendum of 2017, he was imprisoned from October 2017 until June 2021 under charge of sedition brought by the Spanish prosecutor's office. In October 2019, after two years of pre-trial detention, Cuixart was sentenced to nine years of prison for sedition. Amnesty International believes his detention and sentence constituted a disproportionate restriction on his rights to free speech and peaceful assembly, and urged Spain to free him. The NGO Front Line Defenders and the Council of Europe consider Jordi Cuixart a human rights defender. He repeatedly said that "as a political prisoner my priority is not getting out of prison, but the solution of the political situation and struggle for democracy and human rights". He was freed in June 2021 following a government pardon.

Biography

Cuixart was born in 1975 in Santa Perpètua de Mogoda. His mother hailed from Murcia and his father from Badalona. He lived in Santa Perpètua de Mogoda for 30 years before moving to Sabadell, where he remained until his imprisonment in 2017.

As a teenager, he studied mechanics in the vocational education centre Institut Escola Industrial i d'Arts i Oficis in Sabadell. He joined Òmnium Cultural in 1996. In addition, he is a member of different social organisations, such as Can Capablanca, a pro-Catalan independence social centre in Sabadell, the cooperative financial institution Coop 57, and Amnesty International. He was an objector to Spanish military service.