The Spanish Supreme Court has canceled an arrest warrant for Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan separatist leader who fled the country in 2017 and had been living in Belgium, allowing him to return to Catalonia. The decision, which the court announced on Tuesday afternoon, paves the way for Mr. Puigdemont to benefit from an amnesty law passed by Parliament in 2024.\n\nThe decision came hours after Spain’s Constitutional Court ruled that the Supreme Court must apply the amnesty law in full, after a Supreme Court judge had refused to cancel warrants for Mr. Puigdemont and other separatist leaders who were facing embezzlement charges. The Constitutional Court, which has the final say on constitutional matters in Spain, had already upheld the amnesty law itself.\n\n“The Constitutional Court’s decision to apply the amnesty is a victory for the independence movement,” said a spokesman for the Catalan separatist party that Mr. Puigdemont leads, Junts.
As the president of the Catalonia government in October 2017, Mr. Puigdemont was at the heart of a national crisis when he organized a referendum on independence for Catalonia. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, pushed through the amnesty law in late 2023 with the stated goal of restoring “coexistence and reconciliation” to Catalan society.\n\nMr. Sánchez’s critics seized on the canceling of Mr. Puigdemont’s arrest warrant to attack the amnesty law. “Nothing can erase the fact that the amnesty is yet another deception by Sánchez,” the conservative opposition leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said on Tuesday. The decision established a precedent for other separatist leaders, including Mr. Puigdemont, who can now return to Spain without being arrested.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing