Spanish court ruling clears way for Catalan separatist Puigdemont's return after nine years in exile

Spain's Constitutional Court ruled on Tuesday that the country's 2024 amnesty law covers embezzlement charges stemming from Catalonia's 2017 independence bid, a decision that within hours prompted a Supreme Court judge to lift the national arrest warrant against Carles Puigdemont, the self-exiled former Catalan president who has spent nearly a decade avoiding Spanish justice from Belgium.

The ruling does not yet bring Puigdemont home. He gave no date for a return and, according to associates, is weighing the political and legal risks of setting foot in Spain for the first time since fleeing in October 2017, as Al Jazeera noted in its account of the ruling. But it removes the single biggest legal obstacle that has kept him abroad, and it lands at one of the most volatile moments of Pedro Sánchez's premiership, with the country now heading toward an early general election.

What the court decided, and the numbers behind it

The Constitutional Court's progressive majority sided with an appeal filed by Dolors Bassa, a former Catalan social affairs minister, against a Supreme Court ruling that had excluded embezzlement from the scope of the amnesty. By extension, the same doctrine applies to Puigdemont and two other officials who left Spain with him, Toni Comín and Lluís Puig, as well as to Oriol Junqueras and Jordi Turull, senior separatist figures who had faced disqualification from office.

The numbers that frame the case go back nearly a decade. On October 1, 2017, Catalonia held an independence referendum that Madrid had declared illegal; according to the regional government's own count, 90.18 percent of ballots favored secession against 7.83 percent opposed, but turnout was only 43.03 percent after police seized ballot boxes and shut polling stations across the region. Puigdemont, then the region's president, fled to Belgium weeks later rather than face prosecution and has lived there, in self-imposed exile, for roughly nine years. Spanish prosecutors originally pursued rebellion, sedition and embezzlement charges that together could have carried decades in prison; sedition was dropped after a 2023 reform of the penal code, leaving embezzlement, which carries a maximum sentence of around eight years, and a lesser disobedience charge.

How an amnesty law became a European legal puzzle

The case's path to Tuesday's ruling runs through Brussels as much as Madrid. Sánchez's Socialists pushed the amnesty law for Catalonia, formally enacted on June 10, 2024, through parliament as the price of support from Puigdemont's Junts party and the leftist ERC after the 2023 general election left Sánchez short of a majority. The law granted amnesty for offenses tied to the 2014 Catalan consultation and the 2017 referendum, but Spain's Supreme Court, led by investigating judge Pablo Llarena, initially refused to apply it to embezzlement, arguing that diverting public money for personal enrichment fell outside the law's scope.

That stand-off was broken in the summer. In July, the Court of Justice of the European Union's Grand Chamber held that EU law did not prevent Spain from adopting the amnesty, finding the legislation pursued the legitimate aim of reducing "institutional and political tensions" in Catalonia. The European judges stopped short of ordering Spanish courts to apply the law in any particular way, but, as Catalan News reported at the time, the ruling cleared the way for Spain's own Constitutional Court to decide whether embezzlement was covered. Tuesday's decision answered that question, instructing the Supreme Court to treat the pardon of embezzlement as, in the words of court president Cándido Conde-Pumpido, "the only conclusion reconcilable with the rules of logic and common sense."

Who is affected, in Catalonia and in Madrid

The immediate beneficiaries are a small group of separatist leaders: Puigdemont and fellow exiles Comín and Puig in Belgium, and Junqueras and Turull in Catalonia, both of whom had been barred from holding office because of their roles in 2017. More broadly, the ruling touches Junts, the party Puigdemont still leads from abroad, which has used its small bloc of seats in Madrid's parliament to extract concessions from Sánchez's minority government over the past three years, including the amnesty itself.

It also touches the roughly 7.7 million residents of Catalonia, where the independence movement has cooled considerably since the fervor of 2017 but remains a defining axis of regional politics, and the wider Spanish electorate now being asked to vote again. The timing could hardly be more sensitive: Sánchez's government is heading toward a snap national election on November 29 after losing a parliamentary vote on housing policy, and the conservative People's Party of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, which has led most recent polling, may again need Junts's backing, or at least its abstention, to govern.

Reaction in Barcelona, Madrid and Waterloo

Jordi Turull, Junts's secretary-general, framed the ruling as vindication for a strategy of exile and litigation that spanned two continents and nearly a decade.

"They held firm, they resisted, they prevailed in Europe, and today they prevailed against the Spanish state," Turull said.

Puigdemont, in a statement relayed from Belgium, called the decision "a victory that obliges us to put an end to political repression," while declining to say when, or whether, he would return. Sánchez, who has faced sustained criticism from the right over the amnesty since before it passed, defended the law again on Tuesday, saying he did not regret it. "I believe the important message is of coexistence among Catalans," he said. Feijóo's People's Party has long argued that applying amnesty to embezzlement rewards the misuse of public funds for a political cause, and PP lawmakers have signaled they will challenge the written ruling once it is published.

What happens next

The Constitutional Court's full written judgment is expected to be published in Spain's official gazette, the Boletín Oficial del Estado, around October 26, formally binding the Supreme Court's criminal chamber. Llarena is expected to apply the same reasoning to the individual appeals still pending from Puigdemont, Comín and Puig rather than wait for the court to rule on each separately, which would extinguish the domestic warrants that have kept them out of Spain since the European arrest warrants were dropped in July.

Even so, Puigdemont's own advisers have suggested, in comments carried in wire-service reporting on the ruling, that he is unlikely to rush back immediately, let alone campaign in a tense pre-election climate that could amplify both his welcome among supporters and the backlash from opponents who see the amnesty as a political bargain rather than an act of justice. Whether or not he returns before the November 29 vote, his legal position in Spain, unsettled since the night he crossed into France in a car bound for Brussels, has now fundamentally changed, and with it, one of the longest-running points of friction in Spanish politics.