Twenty-two of them were classified as domestic extremist or separatist cases, and a further four were "historic cases", dating back to the 1980s and 1990s.
A2 Turkish Journalist Freed Nadire Mater was acquitted of charges that she insulted the Turkish military in a book about the war against Kurdish separatists, in a case watched closely by advocates of press freedom and human rights.
But as an immigrant who moved here from Shanghai 20 years ago, he is worried by the way separatists advance their case for nationhood with claims to a distinct Catalan national culture, language and identity that set it apart from Spain.
The reduced tensions evolved over time, but the process was helped along by flight of a large number of angry and fearful English-speaking Quebecers to Ontario and the United States in the 1970's and 1980's as the separatists pressed their case.
The system is gamed to favour Han Chinese.As with Tibetan areas last year, the crackdown on Uighurs thought to have even a scintilla of separatist sympathies, in this case for an independent East Turkestan, has already begun and will be brutal.
That the issue remains, above all, political is demonstrated over the border, in the Catalan region of southern France, where bullfighting is embraced as fiercely as it is opposed in Spanish Catalonia, for exactly the same separatist reasons, in that case because it is banned in Paris.
Beijing sees parallels between those cases and separatist movements in its own regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, where it fears Western condemnation or even intervention if conditions deteriorate.
Foreign journalists and diplomats are repeatedly told that they need documents issued by the separatist authorities or in some cases, as shockingly happened to the French ambassador to Georgia, Russian visas.
He said Ms Lamont had done a "good job", but argued the the next leader needed to "stand up against the separatists and make the case for a fair Scotland".
In many cases, separatists have claimed that columns are not Russian military vehicles but trophies stolen from the Ukrainian army.
In the mid-1960s, theso-calledled "wise men" had been recruited by the Liberal Party of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson in order to enhance francophone participation in federal government and to help Ottawa quell potentially dangerous political clashes with Québec's increasingly neo-nationalist-inspired, and in some cases separatist-oriented, political parties and successive governments.
