The Constitutional Court begins debate on amnesty today.

BarcelonaThe judges of the Constitutional Court are meeting this Monday with a particularly important issue on the table: the amnesty law. The judges will begin debating the constitutionality of the law in a deliberation that is expected to last until Friday. On the table is the report—the draft ruling—prepared by the court's vice president, the progressive Inmaculada Montalbán, who supports the pardon but does not comment on the embezzlement, key to the future of former President Carles Puigdemont.

Montalbán's brief gives the green light to the bulk of the law and dismantles the vast majority of arguments the PP raised against it in its appeal. "The legislature can do anything that the Constitution does not explicitly or implicitly prohibit," the report states, which only considers three minor grounds of unconstitutionality. Regarding the scope of the law, it concedes that it should also include those who demonstrated against independence; regarding the temporal scope of the law, it limits the eligible events to November 13, 2023, the day the law was registered in Congress, and also forces the Court of Auditors to hear popular accusations before closing the accounting cases.

The judges have been studying the draft sentence for three weeks, but the importance of their decision led the president of the Court of Guarantees, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, to extend the plenary session on the subject to five days: from this Monday, June 23rd, to Friday, June 27th (originally scheduled for June 24th to 26th). The request was made by Judge Enrique Arnaldo, from the Conservative faction, who is in the minority on the Constitutional Court.

The expectation is that the plenary session will endorse the proposed ruling in favor of the amnesty, although it does not resolve one of the underlying problems. The nearly 200-page text does not address the issue of embezzlement, the key to the ongoing conflict in the Supreme Court with the pro-independence leaders. However, the PP's appeal, in fact, made no mention of it, and the investigating judge in the Supreme Court, Pablo Llarena, has no intention of making a move, regardless of what the Constitutional Court says.

Llarena interprets the case of October 1st as not eligible for amnesty because embezzlement is excluded under the wording of the law and, therefore, the lifting of the precautionary measures—mandatory until a decision is made on whether to close the case—is not binding on him. This prevents Puigdemont, but also former ministers Toni Comín and Lluís Puig, from taking any action. can return to Catalonia with guarantees that they will not be arrested.

The most likely scenario in Puigdemont's case is to wait for the Constitutional Court to rule on his appeal for amparo. It will be through this appeal that the judges should explicitly address whether the misappropriation of funds in the October 1st case is covered by the amnesty and directly question (if they deem it necessary) the Supreme Court's opinion thus far.