Human rights do not exist in nature. They are not written in any fossilized rock, nor in any gene. They are either a moral requirement, or a convention (like money, bitcoin, or state borders): solidly shared "fictions", forged through much suffering, but which work as long as enough people believe in them. The French Revolution happened at a very specific moment of political and social upheaval, and the Universal Declaration of 1948 is a child of the trauma of World War II. And even today, although it may not seem so, it is far from being universally recognized.This fragility is also evident in our own country. The liberal consensus on the preeminence of the individual is no longer undisputed: increasingly, voices from both the left and the right are calling for its relativization in the name of something "superior" (the nation, the community, security, progress...). This is not new. Fascism already subordinated individual rights to the might of the State and the nation, and communism (China today is the clearest example, the USSR rested on an overly Western imaginary to last) relativizes individual rights in the name of the "common good" or the rights of the working class or the single class. Ideologies antagonistic in origin, but coincident in the “necessity” that individual rights be, at the very least, relativized.A legal (or philosophical) figure like human rights cannot exist without a sufficient social base. To put it plainly, to have liberal rights, you need liberals. As a viable political project (not as an abstract idea, but as a system that someone defends and enforces with laws and courts), they need a middle class, a certain segment of the liberal bourgeoisie. There are no principles that can sustain everything, no matter how much they appear in a sacred or constitutional text: someone must embody them, someone must vote for them and defend them with constancy. Historically, this role has been played by the urban middle class: people with enough wealth and education to desire stable rules, protected property, and basic legal institutions that can withstand the (otherwise essential) turbulence of history.Without parties with a real social base, liberal principles become blurred like drops in the rain or like a promise from socialists. The problem, now quite visible, is that the middle class is not an eternal fact: we see it being squeezed and polarized towards the extremes now that the social ladder, clamorously, is stopping. It happens here and it happens in a good part of the West. 

Junts has chosen a political family in Europe. After being left without one in 2018Carles Puigdemont's party is on the verge of joining the European Democratic Party (EDP), which is part of the Renew Europe group in the European Parliament. Several sources consulted by ARA explain that the pro-independence party is finalizing its entry, although the maneuver has stalled at the last minute due to internal reservations within the centrist and social-liberal European party.