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Most extradition treaties contain a political offence exception clause, which precludes extradition from taking place when the concerned crime is considered to be political by the requested state. This clause has been abolished within the European Union (EU), where mutual trust prevails among Member States, allegedly rendering such safeguards obsolete. This article, however, seeks to question the commonly agreed outdatedness of the political offence exception clause within the EU framework, looking at the context of its abolition, the role Spanish authorities played in it at the time of its abolition, the way they have handled the Catalan crisis since 2017 and the exportation of the latter at the EU level. It argues that the situation in which Catalan exiles are today casts doubt over the obsolescence of safeguards such as the political offence exception and further contends that human and political rights safeguard mechanisms should not be perceived as hampering mutual trust and judicial cooperation in criminal matters in the EU.

This article examines the changing balance established by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) between human rights filters to extradition and the obligation to cooperate and how this shift of rationale brought the Court closer to the position of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in that respect. The article argues that the ECtHR initially adopted a position whereby it prioritised human rights concerns over extraditions, but that it later nuanced that approach by establishing, in some cases, an obligation to cooperate to ensure proper respect of human rights. This refinement of its position brought the ECtHR closer to the approach adopted by the CJEU that traditionally put the obligation to cooperate above human rights concerns. In recent years, however, the CJEU also backtracked to some extent from its uncompromising attitude on the obligation to cooperate, which enabled a convergence of the rationales of the two Courts. Although this alignment of the Courts was necessary to mitigate the conflicting obligations of European Union Member States towards both Courts, this article warns against the danger of making too many human rights concessions to cooperation in criminal matters.