Spain's Supreme Court cut ten pieces out of the immigration regulation, and the one that touches most readers is not the one in the headlines

A court can strike a rule down in July and the rule can carry on being applied all summer. That is close to what happened in Spain. On Tuesday the official gazette printed the operative parts of two Supreme Court judgments against the immigration regulation, one dated 8 July and one dated 29 July, and only at that moment did the provisions they removed stop existing for everybody. The coverage that followed led almost everywhere on criminal records. That is the part of the decision least likely to touch anyone reading this. The part that will is a single paragraph about whether Spain is allowed to make you file online.

What landed this week

Two separate groups took Spain's immigration regulation to court, and both partly won. The first case was brought by the Asociación Coordinadora de Barrios, the Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos de España and Extranjeristas en Red, and produced judgment 868/2026 of the Supreme Court's third chamber on 8 July 2026, later corrected by an order of 1 September. The second was brought by Cáritas Española, the Comisión Española de Ayuda al Refugiado, Federación Andalucía Acoge, Red Acoge and the Servicio Jesuita a Migrantes, and produced a judgment of 29 July 2026. Both were published in the gazette on 22 September, one after the other.

The first judgment annulled ten lettered items: a paragraph barring temporary employment agencies from seasonal work permits, wording requiring a parent or guardian relationship to have been created under Spanish law, wording forcing an elderly parent's financial dependence to have arisen back home, the automatic criminal record refusals in two articles, the word unmarried in two places, a condition about a child never having left Spain, a phrase about relationships constituted under Spanish law in a second article, two words that made emergency care for a child of uncertain age discretionary, and the whole of the paragraph on mandatory electronic filing. Everything else the claimants attacked was upheld. The court also refused to send a question to the Court of Justice of the European Union. The second judgment went further on almost nothing and simply repeated that the electronic filing paragraph is void, which is the clearest signal in the whole week about which provision the court considered indefensible.

Why a judgment from July only started to bite on Tuesday

This is the mechanical part, and it explains a gap that looks like negligence and is not. Under article 72.2 of the law governing Spanish administrative courts, when a final judgment annuls part of a general regulation, the annulment takes effect for everyone from the day the ruling and the struck provisions are printed in the same official publication that originally carried the regulation. Until that day the decision binds the parties to the case and nobody else. Both judgments ordered their own publication under that article, which is why 22 September, and not 8 July, is the date that matters if you are trying to work out which version of the rules your file was decided under.

It also explains why the consolidated text of the regulation now carries small annotations next to the affected articles, recording that this or that phrase has been declared void. Those annotations went live with the publication. If you or an adviser were reading the regulation in August and relying on what it said, you were reading something that a court had already killed but that had not yet been buried.

The rule that forced you online is gone, and students are in its first line

Article 197.2 was the provision that both benches struck, and it is worth reading what it actually covered before deciding it is a technicality. It listed seven kinds of application that individuals were obliged to submit through the electronic channel, and the first entry on the list is extensions of student stay authorisations, along with student mobility, volunteering and training activities. The rest of the list is initial applications for employed work permits, renewals of non-lucrative residence, renewals of self-employed permits, renewals of residence with a work exception, initial seasonal work permits, and the collective hiring in origin scheme that brings seasonal workers to Spain from abroad. If you are a student extending your stay, or somebody filing a first work permit, you were inside that list.

The court did not say electronic administration is unlawful. It said this particular obligation was imposed without the justification and proportionality that Spanish law demands before a private individual can be compelled to deal with the state only through a screen, and it left the door open in terms: the government may impose an electronic obligation on specific categories of immigration procedure if it does the work of justifying it properly. So the honest reading is that a legal basis was removed and can be rebuilt, not that paper counters are reopening.

What survives matters just as much. Article 197.1 was not annulled, and it still says that residence and work applications are presented in person at the competent immigration office, that the personal appearance requirement is treated as satisfied by an electronic submission, and that a person without electronic means has a route to assisted filing. That last provision was always there and was always the thing an office should have offered somebody with no digital certificate, no smartphone and no gestor. The difference now is that it cannot be answered with a rule saying the electronic channel is compulsory, because that rule no longer exists.

The criminal record ruling is real, and much narrower than it sounds

Here is where the headlines and the judgment part company. The regulation already said, in article 98.1, that previous convictions inside or outside Spain are not on their own an automatic reason to refuse a family member of a Spanish national, and that a refusal on public order grounds has to rest on the person's own conduct and amount to a real, present and sufficiently serious threat. That was the rule. What followed it was an exception: for four specific family categories, including the unmarried stable partner, a clean record had to be proved in every case. That exception, and matching wording in article 97.4, is what the court struck down.

Even then it did not strike it down generally. The annulment reaches only cases falling within article 20 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which is the narrow line of European law protecting a Union citizen from being forced to leave the Union's territory altogether. In practice that means the non-EU parent or guardian of a Spanish child who depends on them. For those applicants Spain can no longer stop at the existence of a record; it has to weigh the offence, the time since, whether the sentence was served, the person's conduct since then, and the child's interests. For an ordinary work permit, a student file or a standard arraigo application, nothing in your situation changed on Tuesday. Anyone telling you that Spain has stopped caring about criminal records is reading the press release and not the ruling.

A connected annulment in the same family chapter deserves a mention, because it is quietly useful. Article 94.1.f), which covers the parent or guardian of a Spanish minor, carried a sentence requiring that the relationship must have been created under Spanish law. A guardianship constituted abroad, entirely validly, therefore did not qualify. That sentence is gone.

Seasonal work, and the parent who was already in Spain

Two more annulments will move real cases. The first is the third paragraph of article 101.1, which flatly prohibited temporary employment agencies from holding seasonal residence and work authorisations, or being authorised on a change of employer, or appearing in a chain of linked contracts. Seasonal permits in Spain run for four years and allow up to nine months of work in each calendar year, tied to a single employer, and the ban meant an entire category of employer was shut out of sponsoring them. It has been struck. Whether that is good news depends on where you sit, since agency intermediation in seasonal agriculture is exactly where the worst abuses have historically been documented, and the court removed the prohibition on legal grounds rather than as an endorsement of the practice.

The second is smaller in wording and large in effect. Article 196 defines what it means to have a family member financially dependent on you, and required that the dependence occur in the country of origin or departure. A parent already living in Spain could therefore not prove dependency at all, however real it was, because the dependency was happening in the wrong place. That requirement is now void to the extent it blocks proof when the parent is already here. The rest of the definition survives, so the dependence still has to be genuine, stable, sustained over time and in existence before the application was filed.

Rounding out the list, the word unmarried was removed from two articles covering accompanied minors, a condition that a child born in Spain must never have left the country was replaced by a workable test of habitual residence in which temporary and justified absences do not by themselves disqualify, and two words were struck from the age determination article so that immediate protective care for a young person of uncertain age is now unconditional from the moment the police report finding them.

Also this week: France is charging most non-EU students its real tuition

France has had differentiated tuition for non-EU students on the books since 2019, and for years most universities quietly exempted almost everyone from it. That ended with the intake now enrolling. A decree of 19 May 2026 caps how many foreign students a public institution may exempt, at 30 per cent for 2026-27, 25 per cent for 2027-28 and 20 per cent from the year after. The rates themselves are unchanged and are now actually being charged: about 2,895 euros a year for a licence and just under 3,900 for a master's, against the 178 and 250 euros a French or EU student pays.

Two details decide whether this lands on you. Students already exempted in 2025-26 keep their exemption while they continue the same programme at the same institution, and lose it the moment they change either. And French government scholarship holders, students covered by reciprocal agreements between institutions, and students on exchange mobility programmes sit outside the quota rather than competing for a slot inside it. For everyone else the sensible assumption when budgeting is that you will pay the differentiated rate, because the exemption is now a limited resource an institution has to ration rather than a courtesy it can extend to its whole international intake.

Also this week: Italy has 165,850 places for 2027 and no calendar yet

Italy's three-year quota decree sets aside 497,550 entries across 2026 to 2028, of which 165,850 belong to 2027. That part is settled. What is not published is the 2027 click day calendar or the pre-filling window that precedes it, so anybody being told today that they can secure a place in the 2027 quota is being sold a date that does not exist.

The 2026 round is over, and it is worth stating plainly because people are still being charged to apply for it. Those click days ran on 12 January 2026 for seasonal agricultural work, 9 February for seasonal tourism and hospitality, 16 February for non-seasonal employed and self-employed work, and 18 February for family assistance roles, and the pre-filling portal had already closed on 7 December 2025. In the last cycle pre-filling opened in late October for click days the following January, which is the only useful guide to timing anyone has. A click day is decided in the minutes it is open, and it is won on work done months earlier: a real employer, a signed contract, and a complete document set sitting ready in the portal.

What to do with a week like this

The useful lesson from the Spanish ruling is not about criminal records at all. It is that a regulation written in 2024 and applied to hundreds of thousands of files contained at least ten provisions that a court found unlawful, and that it took nearly two years and two separate coalitions of organisations willing to litigate before any of them came out. Files were refused in the meantime on grounds that no longer exist. If yours was one of them, the question is whether your refusal turned on wording that has now been annulled, and whether the time limit for challenging it has run. That is a question with a real answer and a short shelf life, and it is worth asking this month rather than next year.

The broader point running through all three stories is that the published rule and the operating rule drift apart constantly, in different directions, for different reasons. Spain applied a provision for two months after a court had killed it. France kept a fee on the books for seven years and waived it, then stopped waiving it without changing the fee. Italy has a number for 2027 and no date attached to it. None of that is visible if you plan from a summary, and all of it is visible if you read the instrument itself. That is the whole argument for checking the text, or asking somebody whose job is to check it, before you commit money to a plan.

Frequently asked questions

This roundup reflects the position as of 27 September 2026. The two Spanish judgments are final, carry no further appeal and took general effect on publication on 22 September 2026; the annulments described here are the ones in their operative parts and nothing wider. The French tuition decree is in force. Italy's 2027 quota figure is fixed by decree while its application calendar is not yet published, so no 2027 date in this article should be treated as announced. Confirm the current position for your own nationality, status and route before acting on any of it.