A Cambridge professor has launched a campaign to free Pablo Hasél, an imprisoned Catalan rapper and activist.

Last Saturday (20/09), Dr Dominic Keown, Professor Emeritus of Catalan Studies at the University of Cambridge, visited Hasél in Spain to voice support and denounce his imprisonment.

Hasél has been imprisoned in Ponent Prison, Lleida, for over four years, on various charges including “glorifying terrorism” and deriding crown and state institutions through his rap lyrics and tweets.

During Keown’s visit, he spoke with the rapper and “insisted that he [Hasél] tell me how I could help him personally, what shortcomings he had in prison”.

He harshly condemned the “appalling treatment meted out to Pablo Hasél for exercising his right to free speech and creativity,” which, he continued, demonstrated that the Spanish “‘modern democracy’ falls desperately short of that name”.

He reflected on how, in his forty years of teaching Iberian studies at Cambridge, he had watched concerns about freedom of speech “becoming more and more polarised”.

Following Hasél’s arrest in February 2021, protests broke out throughout Spain and Amnesty International immediately condemned the imprisonment as “unjust and disproportionate”.

However, an application Hasél made to the European Court of Human Rights against Spain in May 2021 was declared “inadmissible” – the Court found his conviction “cannot be considered disproportionate,” a decision Amnesty International condemned.

Along with colleagues and interested parties, Dr Keown is launching a campaign for the release of the rapper.

Dr Keown told Varsity: “We will pressure politicians to improve Hasél’s conditions in prison and organize campaigns in universities in all three countries, among young people, to raise awareness and denounce his imprisonment.”

The professor said he has spoken with colleagues in Italy and France, and “we are planning on making life uncomfortable for the prison authorities who are treating Pablo with an extraordinarily heavy hand”. He visited the prison with colleagues Henry Ettinghausen and Toni Strubell.

Upon speaking with the rapper, Keown stated Hasél’s concern “was only for the collective, for the erosion of freedoms”.

While his initial arrest in February 2021 warranted a two-year sentence, the rapper is expected to be released in April 2027, as he has since accumulated more sentences and non-payment fines that have extended his sentence.

The Ministerio de Justicia has been contacted for comment.