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.
The 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.
“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, the prosperous northeastern region, after Spanish courts had found it illegal. Catalonia’s Parliament formally declared independence later that month. In response, the conservative Spanish central government sent in the police, dissolved the regional Parliament and took direct control of Catalonia.
The standoff, Spain’s biggest constitutional crisis in decades, ended with some separatist leaders in prison and split Catalonia in half, leaving deep divisions. The tensions fueled nationalist feeling elsewhere in Spain, and a far-right party has capitalized on the discontent.
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. Mr. Sánchez’s Socialist Party governs the region today and celebrated the Constitutional Court ruling.
“Time has proved us right; Catalonia is moving forward,” Salvador Illa, the Catalan president, said on Tuesday in a post on social media.
Mr. Sánchez’s critics seized on the canceling of Mr. Puigdemont’s arrest warrant to attack the amnesty law. They see it as a political payoff after Junts backed Mr. Sánchez’s return as prime minister in Parliament in 2023.
“Nothing can erase the fact that the amnesty is yet another deception by Sánchez,” the conservative opposition leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said on Tuesday in a post on social media.
But Junts politicians, including Mr. Puigdemont, who briefly returned to Catalonia in 2024, have grown disillusioned with Mr. Sánchez. The party helped strike down a proposed housing bill on Friday, a loss for Mr. Sánchez that pushed him toward snap elections on Nov. 29.
When the amnesty law took effect in 2024, a Supreme Court judge refused to apply it to those were convicted of embezzlement. The judge argued that the use of public money for the independence push amounted to personal enrichment, one of the exceptions to the amnesty law.
One of the separatist leaders appealed to the Constitutional Court, which ruled on Tuesday that the Supreme Court could not exclude embezzlement cases from the amnesty. The decision established a precedent for other separatist leaders, including Mr. Puigdemont, who can now return to Spain without being arrested.
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