Pardons

⚖️ Pardons

A pardon (indulto) is the act of clemency by which the Government remits, wholly or in part, the sentence imposed by a final judgment. It is granted by the Council of Ministers by royal decree, on the proposal of the Ministry of Justice and after a report from the court that handed down the sentence (Act of 18 June 1870, amended in 1988 and 2015). The Constitution prohibits general pardons (art. 62.i): all pardons are individual and all are published in the Official State Gazette (BOE). This page counts them.

How many are granted each year

Royal pardon decrees by year of approval by the Council of Ministers, coloured by the party of the prime minister who governed for longest that year. 2026 only includes the year so far.

The series has occasional spikes of pardons approved in batches: the largest, in December 2000, with 1,328 royal pardon decrees approved in a single month. Since 2014 no year has exceeded 100 pardons, the lowest levels in the whole series.

By government

Each pardon is attributed to the prime minister in office on the day the Council of Ministers approved the royal decree. To compare terms of different length, the table gives the average per year in office.

By party: observed versus expected

The expected figures are the pardons each party would have granted if every government since 1977 had pardoned at the same pace, according to the time each one has governed. A ratio of 1 is what would be expected; 2, twice as many; 0.5, half.

On this calculation, the PSOE has granted 0.87 times the pardons expected given its time in office, the PP 1.31 times and the UCD 0.85. As with any long series, the pace has not been constant: the number of people convicted, criminal law and the courts' approach when reporting have changed a great deal since 1977. That is why it is worth also looking at the comparison within the same period: since 1997, in the full years governed by a single prime minister.

Methodology and sources

• Source: daily summaries of the Official State Gazette (BOE), open data API, since July 1977: royal decrees in section III («Otras disposiciones», other provisions), heading «Indultos», whose title reads «por el que se indulta» (granting a pardon) or «por el que se conmuta» (commuting a sentence). Corrections of errors are not counted.
• What is counted: royal pardon decrees, not people. Some decrees pardon several people and some people receive more than one pardon. No distinction is made between full and partial pardons (the BOE states this in the text of the decree, not in the title). The names of the people pardoned are not stored.
• Date and government: the date is that of the royal decree (the Council of Ministers date, shown in the title), not the publication date, which may come weeks later; it is attributed to the prime minister in office that day, including when acting in a caretaker capacity. For the few undated titles (1977-1978) the publication date is used.
• Expected: total pardons since 5 July 1977 multiplied by the share of that time each party governed. It assumes a constant pace, which is not the case (see the text).
• International comparison: not included; the institution of pardon and how it is published vary greatly from one country to another and there is no consistent official statistic.