Europol again includes independence movement in its terrorism report
The European police agency admits, however, that it does not pose a real threat
BarcelonaEuropol has once again put Catalan independence under the spotlight. In its annual report on the state and trends of terrorism in the European Union, the police body has reincorporated the sovereignist movement into the "Ethno-nationalist and separatist terrorism and violent extremism" section. This inclusion comes just one year after, at the beginning of 2025, Europol would have excluded it from this same list thanks to the political pressure from Esquerra and Junts.
In the document published on July 13 by Europol, the agency dedicates a section to what it explicitly calls "Catalan extremist separatism". The European body assesses that the movement remains "fragmented, operationally stable and largely limited to sporadic and symbolic activity". Furthermore, the text directly highlights that currently "no indication of capacity for sustained or scalable violence" is observed. Despite admitting that it poses a practically null threat, the mere inclusion under a terrorism heading represents a political setback.
To understand the weight of this novelty, we must go back to last year, when Europol decided to remove Catalan and Basque separatism from its report on terrorism in the European Union. Until that moment, separatism was listed as a movement with "active and violent" groups that mixed "simplistic narratives with far-left visions", even though the document did not identify any specific group nor detail which facts justified that definition.
Last year's withdrawal was the direct result of political pressure. When ERC discovered they had been included as terrorists, they quickly demanded explanations, forcing the authorities to apologize and promise a change in methodology when evaluating the situation. Later, former president Carles Puigdemont made this disassociation one of the non-negotiable conditions in exchange for Junts' votes to facilitate the investiture of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Puigdemont demanded that the Spanish state ask Europol to stop treating Catalan independence as terrorism and as the "second threat after jihadism." Fulfilling its commitment, the Spanish PSOE government sent a letter to the agency requesting clarification of "the nature of violent extremism" with the express purpose of decoupling the sovereignist movement from terrorism.
Europol's methodology
So how is its reappearance in 2026 explained? A possible answer lies in the methodology of the European agency itself. As the head of Europol, Jean-Philippe Lecouffe, revealed at the time in a parliamentary committee where he was responding to MEP Diana Riba, Europol does not evaluate reality autonomously, but rather limits itself to collecting and verifying the information transferred to it by member states. "The regulatory framework of each member state is different, and that is why it is up to the member states to define the facts they communicate to us," Lecouffe justified at the time.
Therefore, the re-emergence of independence within the terrorism section opens a new controversy over the information provided by the Spanish state and the criteria used by Europol to classify it. This has been denounced by the ANC, which has recalled that it is Spain that sends "this criminalizing information" and has stressed that "contrary to what it claims, it is not "operational weakness" that distances us from violence, but our firm commitment to non-violent struggle".
