The European Union’s highest court has ruled that Spain’s amnesty law for Catalan separatists does not breach EU law, removing the last European obstacle to a measure Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez passed to stay in office.
In two judgments delivered on July 16, the Court of Justice of the European Union found the legislation neither damaged the bloc’s financial interests nor weakened its counter-terrorism rules. The Grand Chamber of 15 judges, none of them Spanish, said “EU law does not preclude the Spanish amnesty law”.
The ruling is a defeat for the European Commission, which opposed it. Lawyers for Ursula von der Leyen’s executive told the court the law amounted to a self-amnesty and was contrary to the rule of law.
Spain’s parliament adopted it on June 10, 2024 as the price of support from Junts and Esquerra Republicana. Sánchez opposed an amnesty until he needed their votes, and his own government’s 2021 report recommending pardons for the separatists called such a law clearly unconstitutional.
He switched in October 2023, telling his party the measure was a condition of his return to office.
The judgments answer Spain’s Court of Auditors, which is pursuing 35 former Catalan officials including Carles Puigdemont and Artur Mas over public money spent on the illegal referendum of October 1, 2017 and on promoting independence abroad.
Damage to a national budget alone could not establish harm to the EU budget, the court said. Nor could a fall in gross national income that might follow the secession of part of a member state.
That reasoning strikes at the argument used by Spain’s Supreme Court, which held the separatists’ spending had hit tax revenues and therefore the country’s contribution to Brussels.
Judges also rejected the claim that the law blunted the bloc’s terrorism directive, invoked to deny amnesty to 12 members of the Committees for the Defence of the Republic prosecuted by the National High Court.
Luxembourg attached one condition, requiring judges to set aside the law’s two-month deadline for extinguishing liability where it stopped them awaiting a reply to a referral.
Puigdemont declared Catalonia independent in October 2017, days after a referendum the Constitutional Court had banned, then fled to Belgium in the boot of a car. He has been prosecuted in absentia ever since and a national arrest warrant remains in force.
The Supreme Court has refused to amnesty him over embezzlement, holding that he was personally enriched. The Constitutional Court is due to examine that refusal in the autumn.
Sánchez governs on a majority resting on the seven MPs of Junts, the party Puigdemont has run from Belgium for almost nine years. He has tied their support to the amnesty reaching him in full.
