Catalonia to hold vote defying Spain

Catalonia's leader yesterday vowed that a symbolic independence vote banned by the Spanish government will go ahead on November 9, setting up a constitutional conflict unprecedented in post-Franco Spain.

Defying the latest in a string of legal challenges by Madrid, regional president Artur Mas promised to defend Catalans' "right to decide", despite an order from Spain's Constitutional Court a day earlier to suspend the planned vote.

"We have decided to carry on with this participative process... All peoples have the right to decide their future," Mas said in a speech.

"We are defending fundamental rights protected by basic laws: freedom of conscience, freedom of participation and freedom of expression."

Sunday's vote, which Mas insisted is not a "referendum", will be organised by volunteers without an official electoral roll, but holding it in defiance of the court's veto would put Mas on delicate ground.

"If they go ahead, it will be civil disobedience -- not for the people who vote but for the public officials involved. That is a penal offence," said Yolanda Gomez, a constitutional law expert at Spain's distance-learning university UNED.

Catalonia took a step towards greater autonomy in 2006 when it formally adopted a charter that assigned it the status of a "nation". But in 2010 the Constitutional Court overruled that nationhood claim, fuelling pro-independence feeling.

Catalans were fired up by the independence referendum in Scotland in September, even though voters there rejected a separation from Britain.