Criminal law
Published on September 17th, 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. That depends on the summons, which may be calling you as a witness or as an investigado, the person whose possible involvement a court is examining. Those positions carry different obligations and different rights, and the paper does not always make the difference easy to see.
Until 2015 the term was imputado, which 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, and a good many investigations end without any accusation being brought at all.
On the day, the distinction that matters is 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 I recommend reading what a summons actually tells you, and what it does not before the date.
You are usually notified by a citación, a summons served at your registered address. Sometimes it arrives through the police, sometimes by mail, occasionally through a neighbor 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, and 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 matters more than it looks. That is how the court finds you, and someone who cannot be reached and therefore does not appear can end up being 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.
A defense is actually built during this phase, and once it 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, as with expert evidence, telephone records, CCTV that is overwritten on a cycle of days, and witnesses whose memory is fresh now and will not be in a year.
An investigation can run for months with nothing visible happening, which foreign residents tend to read as a sign the matter has gone away, wrongly, and 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, and since the two look identical from outside, silence tells you nothing about which you are in.
That would matter less if you could simply check, but in Catalonia you cannot. A lawyer here has no portal from which to download the case file, and 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 nobody is going to call you when something moves, and you cannot distinguish a dormant case from an active one by waiting, which in a system where time limits run from notification and not from knowledge is where the money gets lost.
More than most people assume can be done, since the investigation phase is the part of the procedure where the defense can still shape what the file contains, rather than argue about what it already contains.
That means asking the court for the steps that favor 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 what the file says, as opposed to what you remember of it.
The first thing I do is get the whole file and read it, which in Catalonia means requesting it rather than downloading it. Then, before advising anything, I establish what exactly is attributed to you and what deadlines are already running, the two answers on which everything that follows depends.
From there the work is ordinary, if unglamorous, and consists of requesting what can still be requested, preserving what degrades with time and preparing the appearance. 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 defense in Barcelona.
Editorial responsibility: Carles Jiménez, Spanish lawyer (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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