employment spain
Spanish Court ruling on working remotely
<p>Recently, some Spanish consulates have been telling applicants for a "non-lucrative" visa that their income cannot be from <strong>any</strong> job, not even telecommuting for a non-Spanish company.</p>

<p>Someone posted in a Facebook group an English summary of a Spanish Court ruling that contradicts this.  I've asked four times there for a link to the (official) Spanish ruling, but no luck.</p>

<p>I find searching for Spanish law on the <a href="https://boe.es/index.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">BOE site</a> difficult.  Matter of opinion whether that's due to the site design or to my limitations with the language.  Update: Just discovered the BOE has a language menu—but when I selected English, was told (in Spanish) that content is not available in English!</p>

<p>I went to <a href="http://www.poderjudicial.es/search/indexAN.jsp" rel="nofollow noreferrer">another site</a> that is for courts only, where a free-text search for visa OR visado OR extranjero had <strong>zero</strong> results.  (On BOE, 65 hits, but none of them were pertinent and only one was from a court.)</p>

<p>Anyone able to provide a citation to the official text of the ruling?</p>

<p>Related: <a href="https://expatriates.stackexchange.com/questions/17856/spanish-court-ruling-on-working-remotely">https://expatriates.stackexchange.com/questions/17856/spanish-court-ruling-on-working-remotely</a></p>

<p>Finally someone re-posted the original English which had enough citation info to find the ruling.</p>
<p>It might be tricky to claim this ruling for the situation in my first paragraph because this case was an appeal for a visa denial that was <strong>not</strong> based on working remotely.  It was based on the Moscow consulate’s <em>suspicion</em> that the applicants’ income claims were false and therefore they might be tempted to work in Spain.  Nevertheless, the dicta in the paragraph cited is pretty clear that “la legislación española, …, no es que el solicitante de este tipo de visados no realice trabajo alguno, sino que no lo realice en España.”</p>
<p>The design of <a href="http://www.poderjudicial.es/search/indexAN.jsp" rel="nofollow noreferrer">CENDOJ</a> uses Javascript to serves the rulings in PDF, and so I am not able to provide a direct URI.  But anyone wanting the full story can probably find it by the following details:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>RoJ: STS 1859/2012 - ECLI:ES:TS:2012:1859</p>
<p>Fecha: 22/03/2012</p>
<p>Ponente: JOSE MANUEL BANDRES SANCHEZ-CRUZAT</p>
</blockquote>
<p>UPDATE: Since the question and answer, I've seen many more complaints about NLVs being denied due to the applicants intending to work remotely.  Not only has the government <strong>not</strong> told the consulates to stop this, but they made a new law creating a <a href="https://www.spainvisa.eu/spain-visa-digital-nomads/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">visa type specifically for remote working</a>.</p>
