Criminal law
Published on 17 September 2026
Most people find out there are criminal proceedings against them through a letter they do not fully understand, and the first thing they want to know is what exactly it makes them. The answer is not obvious, and it is not the same for everyone who receives that letter.
The summons may be calling you as a witness, or as an investigado, the person whose possible involvement a court is examining. Those are two very different positions, with different obligations and different rights, and the paper does not always make the difference easy to see.
Until 2015 the term was imputado. It was replaced precisely because it had come to sound like a verdict in the press, and the law wanted a word that did not imply guilt (Organic Act 13/2015, which gave articles 118, 520 and 775 of the Criminal Procedure Act their current wording). An investigado is a person whose possible involvement is being examined by an investigating court. Many investigations end without any accusation at all.
The distinction that matters on the day is a different one: whether you are summoned as a witness or as an investigado. A witness is obliged to tell the truth. An investigado is not, has the right to remain silent, has the right to a lawyer, and has the right to know what facts are attributed to them before answering anything. Attending the wrong way round is the mistake I see most often, and it is worth reading what a summons actually tells you, and what it does not before the date.
Usually by a citación, a summons served at your registered address. Sometimes it arrives through the police, sometimes by post, occasionally through a neighbour or a building concierge who signs for it.
That last route causes real problems for foreign residents, and the law is blunt about the consequence. At your first appearance the court requires you to designate an address in Spain, or a person to receive notifications on your behalf, and warns you that a summons served there allows the trial to be held in your absence (article 775 of the Criminal Procedure Act). Service at an address you no longer use is still service. A case can be well advanced, or over, by the time you learn it exists.
If you have moved, or you spend part of the year outside Spain, keeping the address on the padrón current is not paperwork. It is how the court finds you, and being unreachable is not neutral: a person who does not appear can end up sought by the court.
The phase is called instrucción, and it is run by an investigating judge, not by the prosecution. Its purpose is to establish whether there is enough to put someone on trial, and to gather and preserve what will later be evidence.
This is where a defence is actually built. Once the phase closes, the ground is largely fixed: what was not requested, was not documented or was not challenged in time is very hard to recover later. Expert evidence, telephone records, CCTV that is overwritten on a cycle of days, witnesses whose memory is fresh now and will not be in a year.
An investigation can run for months with nothing visible happening. Foreign residents tend to read that silence as a sign the matter has gone away, and it is the wrong thing to read into it, for a reason that has nothing to do with how fast or slow the court is.
A case can be genuinely stalled: waiting on an expert report, on a police file, on a request to another country, or simply on a court with more work than hours. It can also have moved three times since you last heard anything. From outside, the two look identical. Silence tells you nothing about which of the two you are in.
That would matter less if you could simply check. In Catalonia you cannot: a lawyer here has no portal from which to download the case file, so following a case means obtaining it through the procurador, the court agent who receives notifications on your behalf, and knowing when to ask for it.
Put the two together and the practical consequence is the one that costs money. Nobody is going to call you when something moves, and you cannot distinguish a dormant case from an active one by waiting. In a system where time limits run from notification and not from knowledge, that is a risk rather than an inconvenience.
More than most people assume. The investigation phase is the part of the procedure where the defence can still shape what the file contains, rather than argue about what it already contains.
That means asking the court for the steps that favour you while they are still possible, preserving what degrades with time, and deciding, with the file in front of you, whether this is a case to fight or a case to close early on the best available terms. It also means knowing the file: not what you remember of it, but what it says.
The first thing I do is get the whole file and read it, which in Catalonia means requesting it rather than downloading it. Then I establish two things before advising anything: what exactly is attributed to you, and what deadlines are already running. Those two answers decide everything that follows.
From there the work is ordinary and unglamorous: what to request while it is still possible, what to preserve before it degrades, and how the appearance is prepared. I do it directly, in English, and every source I rely on is checked against the official text rather than quoted from memory. You can see how I work, and what I do in criminal defence in Barcelona.
Editorial responsibility: Carles Jiménez, attorney-at-law (Barcelona Bar No. 34.946). This note was prepared with the assistance of artificial-intelligence tools and reviewed and approved by the author before publication.
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