What changed
Spain’s Supreme Court has upheld the lifting of national arrest warrants for former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and former ministers Lluís Puig and Toni Comín. The decision removes the reported legal barrier to Puigdemont’s return to Spain, nearly a decade after he fled to Belgium following Catalonia’s banned 2017 independence referendum.
The ruling follows a Constitutional Court decision rejecting Puigdemont’s exclusion from Spain’s 2024 amnesty. It also ends a long legal dispute involving the warrants, which concerned alleged financial crimes linked to organising the referendum.
Why it matters
Puigdemont can now return without fear of arrest under those national warrants. That changes the practical meaning of his exile: the former regional leader may once again operate inside Spain rather than from Belgium or across the border in southern France.
His return is not yet scheduled. Comín plans to travel to Madrid this week for administrative procedures connected to his status as a member of the European Parliament, but Puigdemont’s own timing remains unknown.
The political setting has also shifted. The 2017 vote triggered direct rule over Catalonia, the dissolution of its parliament and the imprisonment of nine former colleagues, later pardoned in 2021. Now, Catalan independence is described as a marginal issue compared with housing and immigration.
That makes the ruling less a reopening of the 2017 crisis than the removal of one of its last major legal barriers. Puigdemont remains leader of Together for Catalonia and has stayed politically active, but whether his return soon changes Spain’s governing parliamentary arithmetic is still uncertain.
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