[5][6][7][8][9] In June 2020 he was sentenced to six months in prison for pushing and spraying washing-up liquid at a TV3 journalist and to two and a half years for kicking and threatening a witness in the trial of a policeman.

[11] This has been labeled an attack on free speech by certain groups both in Spain and overseas, including Amnesty International, and led to numerous protests and riots.

[16] Hasél's father was a businessman and the president of the local football club Unió Esportiva Lleida[20][21] and his mother came from an upper-class family of lawyers.

[11] In October 2011, Hasél was arrested and bailed for a song titled Democracia, su puta madre in which he praised Manuel Pérez Martínez "Camarada Arenas", the former secretary general of the PCE(r), who was sentenced to 17 years in prison for belonging to the terrorist group GRAPO.

[23] In April 2014, Hasél was given a two-year prison sentence for the lyrics of ten songs in praise of GRAPO, ETA, Al-Qaeda[5][24][25][26] the Red Army Faction and Terra Lliure, and threats against leading politicians like José Bono or Patxi Lopez.

[29] In May 2014, Hasél was arrested for being part of a group of around fifteen people that attacked a stall belonging to the Lleida Identitària, linked to the far-right Platform for Catalonia (PxC) party.

[7][30] In November 2014, Hasél released a song called "Menti-ros" which included several depictions of shooting, stabbing or bombing the mayor of Lleida, Àngel Ros.

In one of those tweets used in the court case Hasél wrote that Joseba Arregi Izagirre, a 1981 accused ETA member, was tortured to death in a Madrid prison; pointing out this fact was part of the evidence used to claim he supported terrorism.

[45] On 12 February 2021, the day of his deadline to go to prison, Hasél released the song, Ni Felipe VI, ironically dedicating it to "the misnamed progressive [PSOE-Podemos] government which has perpetuated repression.

Hasél and 10 defendants had the intention, according to the Public Prosecutor's Office, to disrupt the protection operation and "gain access to the building", a symbol of the central government in Lleida.

The State Attorney's Office is involved in the case to claim compensation for the material damage, while the Generalitat de Catalunya brought no action against Hasél.

It stated that – in addition to the lack of legal clarity – Spanish courts in Madrid had not explained in such cases whether the denounced "glorification of terrorism really entailed the risk of a real, concrete and immediate danger".

[60][61][62] In November 2023, the European Court of Human Rights declined Pablo Hasél's application against Spain, stating that it considered his conviction to be proportional, based on relevant and strong enough grounds and addressing a pressing social need.

The ECHR also justified its ruling by stating that unlike some other defendants whose sentencing by Spanish courts it had criticised previously, Hasél, when making critical statements about the monarchy and police, had not been a representative of a political party but merely a singer and had had time to consider his utterances rather than speaking on the spur of the moment; he had also not included evidence for his positions in the tweets and the songs.

[66][67][68][69] Nearly 200 people were detained, 200 injured,[70] a Reuters-journalist and a 19-year-old woman, who lost an eye, were among those when agents from the Mossos d'Esquadra fired foam bullets into the crowd.