23 year old rapper gets 3 years jail term for rapping about Corruption
https://mrrightsng..com.ng/2018/03/23-year-old-rapper-gets-3-years-jail.html

It’s not unusual for an artist to come under fire for controversial lyrics. Just recently, Nigerian Rap King and YBNL Boss, Olamide was severly criticized for his hit track song titled Science Students over what some people assumed was promoting drug abuse, a claim the rapper strongly defended.

However, Mr Rights have learn that one Spanish rapper is facing legal consequences for lyrics that appeared in songs he shared on YouTube.

The Spanish rapper, Josep Miquel Arena has been sentenced to three and a half years jail term over the content of his rap lyrics. Josep Miquel Arenas, popularly known by his stage name Valtonyc, was given the jail sentence in the Spanish Supreme Court last week.

Sixteen of Valtonyc’s songs, including “Facism is Cured by Dying” and “They Should be Afraid 2,” were exhibited as evidence in court. They call out the King and other members of the royal family and members of government for repression and corruption, with references to real events and their imagined consequences, with lines including “The King has an appointment in the town square with a rope around his neck and let the weight of the law fall on him.”

During the hearing, the rapper said that he conceived the track as a proposal of Podemos' leader Pablo Iglesias, for his weekly program La Tuerka.

Iglesias also expressed his support for the musician in a tweet saying “Impunity for the corrupted, and jail for creating a song. Rapping about the King should not be a crime.”

The song included lyrics suggesting that (nationist leader) Jorge Campos, head of the Circulo Balear Foundation, “deserved a nuclear bomb,” and “Monarchy is his ideology ... I'll see you in the Royal Palace with a Kalashnikov,” adding that “we want death for those two.”

“All I've said about the King, is in the media: the fact that he killed his brother, that he had lovers, that he killed an elephant ... so which insults are we talking about if everything was already published in newspapers?” he asked El Español.

In one of his songs titles Tuerka Rap, Valtonyc criticises Spanish monarchy, saying ‘’the situation worries me quite a bit, how to support two families: mine, and the royal one’’.

Other lyrics of Valtonyc’s that were presented in the court case included ‘we want death for these pigs’ referring to Spanish corrupt politicians. He also referred to an armed conflict between Spain and the Basque National Liberation Movement that lasted from 1959 to 2011 rapping ‘may they be afraid like a [Spanish] Guardia Civil police officer in Euskadi [the Basque Country]’.

According to reports from Spainish Newspaper Catalan News, the court ruled that his lyrics glorified terrorism, was slanderous, defamed against the crown and made threats.

This isn’t the first time a rapper has been given a jail sentence in Spanish court for their lyrics. Pablo Hansel was sentenced to two years in prison by the Spanish National Court in 2011 over charges of glorification of terrorism connected to the Basque Conflict.

I doubt freedom after speech.

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