The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has annulled the July 2023 judgment of the General Court of the European Union (see EUROPE 13216/17), which had confirmed European Parliament’s March 2021 decisions waiving the immunity of Carles Puigdemont, Antoni Comín and Clara Ponsatí (see EUROPE 12674/2), in a judgment handed down on Thursday 5 February (case C-572/23 P).
After the illegal referendum on self-determination in Catalonia in October 2017, the Spanish Supreme Court asked European Parliament to waive the immunity of the three Catalan separatist leaders who had been elected MEPs in the 2019 European elections.
In its judgment, the CJEU goes against the Opinion of the Advocate General delivered in September 2025 (see EUROPE 13702/27).
The Court of Justice noted that, in order to ensure the impartiality of the rapporteur examining a request for waiver of immunity, Parliament established a rule stipulating that the rapporteur cannot belong to the same political group as the MEP whose immunity is at issue.
However, in the Court’s view, for the sake of consistency, Parliament must also exclude a rapporteur who is a member of a political group that includes MEPs from the same political party that initiated the criminal proceedings against the MEP whose immunity is at issue. If this is the case, such a rapporteur could be perceived as biased, and his or her appointment would be contrary to the right to good administration.
The Court is therefore of the view that the General Court erred in holding that the membership of the rapporteur appointed to examine the requests for waiver of immunity, Angel Dzhambazki (ECR, Bulgarian), who belonged to the same conservative group as the Spanish VOX party which initiated the criminal proceedings in Spain against the three Catalan leaders, had no bearing on the assessment of Mr Dzhambazki’s impartiality.
Following the opinion of the Committee on Legal Affairs, European Parliament approved the waiving of parliamentary immunity of the three Catalan MEPs Carles Puigdemont (400 votes in favour, 248 against, 45 abstentions), Toni Comín and Clara Ponsatí (in both cases: 404 votes in favour, 247 against, 42 abstentions).
According to a parliamentary source, the appointment of a rapporteur from the ECR group was mandatory because of the rotation system for allocating reports to political groups. Parliament, which is currently analysing the judgment’s content, could be encouraged to amend its rules of procedure to comply with European case law.
On behalf of the VOX party, whose MEPs now sit in the PfE group, MEP Jorge Buxadé criticised via X a “political“ judgment by the CJEU, a court which, in his view, protects “the Brussels elites” while condemning “patriotic governments“, as in Hungary and previously in Poland. “The judgment also jeopardises the system for waiving parliamentary immunity”, he said.
See the judgment of the Court of Justice: https://aeur.eu/f/kla (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)