Spain: after a court ruling, the Catalan independence leader Carles Puigdemont can now return to the country

“The magistrate of the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court Pablo Llarena has issued today an order in which he annuls, with immediate effect and until further express judicial resolution, the national search and arrest warrants and detention of the former president of the Catalan Generalitat Carles Puigdemont and the former counselors Antoni Comin and Lluis Puig,” the court said in a statement.

The decision was made known shortly after the Constitutional Court endorsed the application of the amnesty law approved two years ago by the Spanish Parliament, also to the crime of embezzlement.

Immediately afterwards, the president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, He celebrated news that he stated allows Catalonia to “look forward.”

“Celebrate the fact that with this we also help Catalan society, as it has been demanding all this time,” he indicated in a press conference.

Puigdemont, then president of this region of northeastern Spain, left for Belgium a few days after the Catalan Parliament unsuccessfully declared independence in October 2017, thus avoiding being arrested, as were other members of his government.

Although the amnesty for those behind the secession attempt was approved two years ago, Puigdemont and other pro-independence leaders had not yet been able to benefit from it because The Supreme Court decided that it was not applicable to those investigated for the crime of embezzlement.

For this reason, they then appealed to the Constitutional Court (TC), which this Tuesday gave its favorable view to the first of the appeals presented.

Immediately afterwards, the Supreme Court judge in charge of Puigdemont’s case – who, unlike other pro-independence leaders, was not tried or imprisoned in Spain at any time – decided to leave the arrest warrants “provisionally without effect”, “without prejudice to resolving later what is legally appropriate”, according to the order.

Thus, Puigdemont now has the door open to return to the country where, since his departure, he only spent a few hours during a brief return in 2024.

The amnesty law, deeply divisive and highly criticized by the right-wing opposition, was definitively approved by the Spanish Parliament in May 2024.

The measure was the bargaining chip that Pedro Sánchez had to pay to be invested again as president of the Government at the end of 2023, thanks to the necessary support of the Catalan independence parties, including Junts per Catalunya, of Carles Puigdemont.

The Supreme Court considered, however, that the law was not applicable to those investigated for embezzlement and until now stopped the return of Puigdemont, one of the great icons of the institutional crisis unleashed in Spain during the separatist escalation.

In July, the European justice system endorsed the controversial law, which it defined as an instrument that “seeks to reduce institutional and political tensions and facilitate a scenario of reconciliation.”