Carles Puigdemont, the former Catalan president who fled Spain nearly nine years ago after a failed independence bid, can now return home without fear of arrest after Spain’s Supreme Court on Monday confirmed the withdrawal of his arrest warrant.
Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena upheld his October 6 decision to lift the arrest warrants for Puigdemont and former Catalan Cabinet Ministers Antoni Comin and Lluis Puig, rejecting an appeal by the far-right Vox party. The ruling lands just weeks before Spain’s early national election on November 29, setting up a potentially explosive homecoming.
A nine-year exile nears its end
Puigdemont fled to Belgium in October 2017 after his regional government held an independence referendum that Madrid had declared illegal and then declared independence anyway. Spain imposed direct rule on Catalonia, and Puigdemont has lived in Belgium ever since — with the exception of a brief appearance in Barcelona in August 2024, when he addressed supporters before disappearing and prompting a police manhunt.
In a televised address from his home in the Belgian town of Waterloo earlier this month, Puigdemont hailed the court rulings as a victory that “obliges us to put an end to political repression,” but gave no indication of when he plans to return.
Amnesty battle is not over
The warrant’s withdrawal follows a Constitutional Court ruling that an amnesty law for Catalan separatists applies to the embezzlement charges against Puigdemont. The Supreme Court had initially ruled that the amnesty did not apply to the crime of embezzlement, which meant Puigdemont and others could still be arrested on charges of embezzling the funds spent on the referendum.
Llarena acknowledged that the Constitutional Court’s interpretation was binding, although he criticized its reasoning and defended the Supreme Court’s previous position. He stressed that Monday’s decision only concerned the arrest warrants and did not mean Puigdemont had been formally granted amnesty — a final decision on whether to dismiss the criminal proceedings must come from the Supreme Court’s criminal chamber.
The amnesty law itself was approved by parliament in 2024 under an agreement between Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party and Puigdemont’s Junts party, whose parliamentary support helped Sanchez secure another term. “They held firm, they resisted, they prevailed in Europe and today they have prevailed against the Spanish state,” said Junts secretary general Jordi Turull.
