Joan Herrera i Torres
Encyclopedia
Joan Herrera i Torres is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
, 29 January 1971) is a Spanish
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
Catalan
Catalonia
Catalonia is an autonomous community in northeastern Spain, with the official status of a "nationality" of Spain. Catalonia comprises four provinces: Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, and Tarragona. Its capital and largest city is Barcelona. Catalonia covers an area of 32,114 km² and has an...
lawyer and politician. he is the leader of the leftist party Iniciativa per Catalunya.
Herrera gained a Law Degree from the University of Barcelona
University of Barcelona
The University of Barcelona is a public university located in the city of Barcelona, Catalonia in Spain. It is a member of the Coimbra Group, LERU, European University Association, Mediterranean Universities Union, International Research Universities Network and Vives Network...
, and specialises in issues of law and urban environment law, with a postgraduate degree at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
He began his political activism in the grouping Youth with Initiative (JIC) in the Barcelona
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
district of San Martin. In 1996 he began his career in politics when he was elected National Coordinator of JIC, a position he held until 2000. Under his leadership the youth organization was defined as eco-socialist, a definition later used by the grouping Initiative for Catalonia Greens
Initiative for Catalonia Greens
Initiative for Catalonia Greens is a political party in Catalonia, Spain. It was formed as a merger of Iniciativa per Catalunya and Els Verds. IC had been an alliance led by Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya and was the equivalent of Izquierda Unida in Catalonia...
(ICV) which Herrera joined.
As a member of ICV, he was responsible for the social movements of the party and coordinated, among others, the "No to War" campaign against the Iraq war for ICV in 2002 and 2003.
On 14 March 2004 he was elected to the Spanish Congress of Deputies representing Barcelona Province
Barcelona (Spanish Congress Electoral District)
Barcelona is one of the 52 electoral districts used for the Spanish Congress of Deputies - the lower chamber of the Spanish Parliament, the Cortes Generales. When first contested in modern times in the 1977 General Election, Barcelona was the largest electoral district in Congress in terms of...
as head of the ICV list and was re-elected at the subsequent election in March 2008.
In January 2007 he was elected vice-president of ICV. Since the ninth meeting of ICV, held in Sabadell in November 2008, is Secretary General of the group.
In 2009, he sought to publicly condemn Pope Benedict XVI for having argued that condoms may in fact do more harm than good in the fight against AIDS.