The Catalan crisis: depoliticisation in tension

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This political cleansing of extradition procedures, however, showed its fragility with the Catalan case. The fact that Spain issued, withdrew and reissued numerous warrants for the same people prompted several MEPs to question the abusive use of the European arrest warrant system by Spain, which was said to damage mutual trust and the European arrest phone number library warrant system as a whole.


In addition, Belgium and Germany – the only two Member States to come to a decision on the European arrest warrants issued for Catalan exiles – both managed to circumvent any assessment of the political charges of the case (sedition and rebellion) so far by persistently refusing the requests for surrender on procedural grounds. In the German case, it was argued that the double criminality requirement could not be fulfilled for the offence of rebellion (although German authorities did accept it for the offence of embezzlement); in the Belgian case, the refusals in executing the warrants pertained to the absence of a national arrest warrant supposed to accompany the European one, and more recently to the competence of the Spanish Supreme Court in issuing European arrest warrants.