Jordi Cuixart

Jordi Cuixart i Navarro (1975) is a Catalan businessman and activist. He is the president of Òmnium Cultural, one of the main non-governmental organisations in Europe, with more than 180,000 members and 60 years of history, focused on the promotion of Catalan language and culture, as well as defender of civil and human rights and the right to self-determination. Cuixart is a political prisoner sentenced to 9 years for sedition. He has been imprisoned since October 2017 as part of his role in a peaceful demonstration, some days before the referendum on self-determination in Catalonia was held on 1 October 2017. Amnesty International, Front Line Defenders, World Organization Against Torture and the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention have all agreed that he was just exercising his rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression. From the first day he spent in prison, he claims for non-violent mobilization as he tells in his book We'll do it again (2020). Jordi Cuixart is the son of a working class family and he has always defended migration as a structural reality and a source of social richness for Catalonia. He left school at 16 and started work in a factory. In 2003, when he was 28, he started his own company, Aranow, which specialises in the manufacture of packaging machinery and exports 90% of its production worldwide. He is a father of two sons of 4 and 1 year old.