MADRID: Spain’s Constitutional Court on Thursday said it had approved an amnesty for Catalan separatists involved in an abortive 2017 independence bid, a victory for the leftist government that staked its survival on the divisive law.
A banned secession referendum and short-lived declaration of independence in the northeastern Catalonia region in 2017 triggered the EU member state’s worst political crisis in decades.
Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez agreed to the amnesty in exchange for Catalan separatist parties’ support to secure a new term in office after 2023 elections produced a hung parliament.
Lawmakers last year narrowly approved the bill, which the government says has restored calm and political normality to Catalonia after the unrest and polarisation that preceded and followed the referendum.
But it infuriated the Spanish right which accuses Sanchez of flouting the rule of law and pardoning the instigators of a “coup” to cling to power.
The Constitutional Court announced it had rejected most points of an appeal against the amnesty’s constitutionality by the main conservative Popular Party (PP) by six votes to four.
“The amnesty is not forbidden by the constitution, and its adoption, when it responds to an exceptional situation and a legitimate end of public interest, may be constitutionally admissible,“ the court said in a statement.
Sanchez welcomed the news, telling reporters in Brussels that Spain was “closing a political crisis that should never have left politics”.
But PP leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo insisted from Brussels that the amnesty was “a corrupt transaction of impunity in exchange for power” and “an attack against the separation of powers”.
Judges apply the law on a case-by-case basis and dozens of figures from the Catalan independence movement have benefited.
But the amnesty has not applied to separatist figurehead Carles Puigdemont, who led Catalonia’s regional administration during the referendum and fled abroad to avoid prosecution.
The Constitutional Court did not state whether embezzlement, a charge that prevents Puigdemont’s inclusion in the amnesty, should come under the law.
