Pirates de Catalunya, member of the European Pirates, undertakes today, March 23rd, all legal and political routes at the European level against the censorship of the Telegram application throughout the Spanish state, led by the judge of the Audiencia Nacional (Spanish National Court) Santiago Pedraz Gómez, after the complaint from Mediaset España, Atresmedia, Movistar Plus+ and EDGEA for copyright infringement.

With the lawyer Josep Jover i Padró, a specialist in European legislation and who has won cases such as the internalization of interim workers to public administrations, we have activated a complaint against the Spanish State to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for the disproportionality of the measures taken by the Audiencia Nacional, as well as the imposition of precautionary measures to reverse the actions of Judge Pedraz.

In addition, we begin to work on the urgent registration in the coming days of consultations to the European Parliament and the European Commission, especially focused on the European Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders, due to the authoritarian and censorious drift of certain sectors of the Spanish state. We will push forward this action with the support of the Czech and German MEPs of the European Pirates.

Finally, Pirates will implement all available measures to provide Telegram users with tools to continue accessing the application, bypassing the block that will begin in the coming hours, and will make sure to continue updating our information channel in this application, as long as it is possible, as disobedience to censorship.

Although Telegram is not free software, a fundamental issue for the protection of user data, we understand that such a disproportionate decision by the courts against an application that is used by 40% of the state’s population, violates an even more fundamental principle, the freedom of expression.

This action is part of Pirates’ strategy in defense of the rights and freedoms, it adds to the complaints against censorship of the web pages that informed about the 1st of October referendum and of the Democratic Tsunami application and website, as well as the complaint against the Central Electoral Board and the General Council of the Judiciary against the politicization of the Spanish justice system, all of them successfully resolved.

Image: Ivan Radic