Puigdemont asks the Constitutional Court for protection to obtain amnesty.

He is demanding that the national arrest warrant issued by the Supreme Court judge investigating his case be urgently lifted.

Former Catalan president and Junts leader Carles Puigdemont appealed to the Constitutional Court (CC) on Thursday with a dual objective. On the one hand, he sought protection against the Supreme Court's (TS) refusal to apply the amnesty law in the case it is conducting against him for his role during the Catalan independence process . He also urgently demanded the lifting of the arrest warrant in force for the magistrate investigating the case, Pablo Llarena, in force.

In the brief, his defense attorney, Gonzalo Boye , points out that the amnesty law is an "organic norm whose constitutionality has been confirmed," referring to the recent ruling by the Constitutional Court ( TC) in June. It was approved with the sole vote of the progressive-party justices, who hold a majority in the plenary session.

The amnesty was the main concession that Junts and ERC wrested from the PSOE in the fall of 2023, in exchange for facilitating Pedro Sánchez's continued leadership of the Moncloa government after losing the general election. For the lawyer, the legislator expressed with this measure "his desire to extinguish criminal liability." He also noted that Puigdemont "lacks the backing of a final conviction," which is why he considered the arrest warrant to be meaningless.

Gonzalo Boye requested that precautionary measures be adopted, therefore, of a very urgent nature , and for which it is not necessary to request a report from the Prosecutor's Office. Thus, his brief could be addressed next week, at the last plenary session the Constitutional Court plans to hold before the holidays. If his request is rejected, it would be processed as a precautionary measure, so it would be necessary to obtain the opinion of the Public Prosecutor's Office.

While awaiting the high court's decision, the latest open battle over the amnesty law is the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU ), which must evaluate four appeals it has received. Last Tuesday, in the first hearing, the European Commission again expressed its sharp criticism of a law it called a "self-amnesty."