The arrest warrant targeting the president of the Catalan regional government since the attempted secession of Catalonia in 2017 therefore remains in force, specifies the court in its decision, which can be appealed within three days from the notification to the parties.
Exceptions provided by law
The Supreme Court’s ruling came as a bolt from the blue, as the amnesty law was supposed to primarily concern Carles Puigdemont, who had hoped to be able to return to Spain quickly. Charged with embezzlement, disobedience and terrorism and subject to an arrest warrant since the events of 2017, Carles Puigdemont had left for Belgium, where he still lives, to flee prosecution by the Spanish justice system, while other separatist leaders had been imprisoned.
Judge Llarena considered that the amnesty law did indeed apply to the offense of disobedience, but that on the other hand, “the behaviors” accused of Carles Puigdemont and two other independence activists “fully correspond to the two exceptions provided for by the law” regarding the offense of embezzlement.
Specifically, the magistrate concluded that there had been an intention on the part of Carles Puigdemont to obtain a personal benefit, with an impact on the financial interests of the European Union, which makes the amnesty inapplicable in his eyes. Therefore, the arrest warrant “is maintained only for the crime of embezzlement, not for that of disobedience”, according to the document. The crime of terrorism, of which Carles Puigdemont is also accused in a separate case, is not addressed in this ruling.
A few minutes after the Supreme Court’s announcement, Carles Puigdemont reacted on the social network via a sybilline message (“La Toga nostra”) seeming to equate the judges and their robes with the Sicilian Cosa nostra mafia.
A difficult task for the courts
On May 30, the Spanish parliament passed an amnesty law for Catalan independence supporters, a price that Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had to pay to be returned to power in November thanks to the support of the two Catalan independence parties, which demanded this measure in return. Since then, the right-wing and far-right opposition have been up in arms against this law, which they consider “unconstitutional”, and against which they have organized numerous demonstrations.
The objective of the legislators was that the courts would immediately begin to cancel the arrest warrants targeting the separatists who had fled abroad, and that these cancellations would remain valid pending the examination of the appeals filed against the law, which could take months or even years. But with more than 400 people prosecuted or convicted for offenses linked to Catalonia’s 2017 independence attempt or to the events that followed or preceded it, the task promises to be difficult for the courts, who must decide case by case.
The magistrates – many of whom do not hide their reluctance or even their frank opposition to this measure that has dominated and radicalized Spanish political life since the elections of July 2023 – had two months, starting at the end of May, to implement it. Last week, two people, a former member of the Catalan regional government and a police officer, became the first beneficiaries of the law and were granted amnesty.
For Pedro Sánchez, who was opposed to it in the past, this amnesty aims to put an end to the instability born from the 2017 secession attempt, one of the worst crises experienced by Spain since its return to democracy after the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975.
