European Arrest Warrant Between Spain and Germany: How It Works

Germany is one of Spain's closest judicial cooperation partners within the European Union, and it is also one of the countries most frequently involved in European Arrest Warrant cases handled by Spanish courts. Because both states are EU members, surrender between them follows a materially different — and generally faster — path than extradition to a country outside the Union. This piece focuses specifically on the Spain-Germany dynamic within that framework; for the general mechanics of how the EAW procedure works in Spain, deadlines, and the full catalogue of grounds for refusal, see our dedicated guide to the European Arrest Warrant in Spain, which this article does not repeat in full.

An EU-to-EU Relationship, Not Extradition

Because Spain and Germany are both European Union member states, the relationship between them is not one of classic bilateral extradition. It is governed by the European Arrest Warrant (EAW), created by Council Framework Decision 2002/584/JHA and implemented in Spain through Law 23/2014 on the mutual recognition of criminal decisions in the European Union. Germany has its own domestic implementing legislation for the same Framework Decision. The result is that when either country wants to bring a person located in the other before its courts, or to enforce a sentence already imposed, the request moves directly between judicial authorities rather than through a diplomatic and governmental process.

Speed: Target Decision Periods

One of the EAW's defining features is how quickly it is meant to resolve. Under the Framework Decision, the executing state's judicial authority is expected to decide within target periods generally described as 60 to 90 days from arrest, depending on whether the requested person consents to surrender and whether an extension is justified by the circumstances of the case. This is dramatically faster than the combined judicial-and-governmental timeline typical of classic extradition to non-EU states, and it reflects the underlying premise of mutual trust between EU judicial systems that Germany and Spain both operate under.

No Dual-Criminality Check for a Closed List of Offences

For most offences, extradition-style cooperation requires dual criminality: the conduct must be a crime in both the requesting and the requested state. The EAW departs from that requirement for a closed list of roughly thirty-two categories of serious offences — such as, for example, fraud or drug trafficking, among others on the list — where the conduct is punishable by at least three years' imprisonment under the law of the issuing state. For a warrant issued by Germany against a person in Spain, or by Spain against a person in Germany, falling within one of these categories means the Spanish or German courts do not need to verify that the underlying conduct is separately criminalised in their own system; they focus instead on whether the warrant's formal requirements are met and whether any ground for refusal applies.

Surrender of Nationals: A Key Difference from Classic Extradition

In traditional extradition to countries outside the EU, many treaties and domestic statutes allow a state to refuse to surrender its own nationals, or make that refusal close to automatic. The EAW works differently. Both Spain and Germany can, as a rule, surrender their own nationals to each other under the EAW — a Spanish national wanted in Germany, or a German national wanted in Spain, does not enjoy the kind of blanket nationality-based shield that would typically apply outside the EU framework. Conditions can still attach in specific situations — for instance, where a national or resident is surrendered to face trial, the executing state may in some circumstances make surrender conditional on that person being returned to serve any resulting sentence in their home country — but nationality alone is not the same barrier it is under classic extradition.

Realistic Grounds to Challenge Execution in Spain

An EAW issued by Germany and executed in Spain is not automatic. Depending on the specific facts, the defence before the Spanish courts — chiefly the Criminal Chamber of the National Court (Audiencia Nacional) — can raise:

• Procedural or formal defects in how the warrant was issued or transmitted.
• Ne bis in idem: that the person has already been finally tried for the same facts, whether in Spain, Germany, or another state.
• Prescription (statute of limitations) under Spanish law, in the circumstances where Spanish limitation rules are relevant to the case.
• Fundamental rights concerns, such as detention conditions or fair-trial guarantees, in the exceptional cases where these are seriously in question between two EU judicial systems that are otherwise presumed to meet a common standard.

Because the EAW rests on a presumption of mutual trust between EU member states, the bar for successfully invoking fundamental rights grounds tends to be applied more strictly than it might be toward a state outside that framework — but it is not a purely theoretical option, and it has been argued successfully in appropriate cases. Each of these grounds requires its own factual and legal groundwork, which is why early legal advice from the moment of arrest, rather than waiting for the hearing, matters in Spain-Germany EAW cases just as much as in any other.

For the fuller picture of EAW procedure in Spain — the 72-hour rule on bringing a detained person before the National Court, the full list of mandatory and optional grounds for refusal, and how the consent decision is made — our guide to the European Arrest Warrant in Spain covers that ground in depth. For the wider network of instruments Spain relies on for international surrender and extradition, see our guide to Spain's extradition treaties.