The 34th Immigration and International Protection Conference of the Spanish legal profession will be held in Benidorm on 5-6 November

The General Council of the Spanish legal profession (Consejo General de la Abogacía Española) will hold its 34th Immigration and International Protection Conference in Benidorm (Alicante) on 5 and 6 November, in person, at the Gran Hotel Bali. Organised by the Immigration and International Protection Subcommittee, the event comes in a year of intense regulatory change and combines keynote sessions with hands-on workshops.

ICA Alicante will host the welcome session on the evening of Wednesday 4 November, and the official opening will start the Thursday programme.

Keynotes: the Regulation, nationality and the EU pact

The first keynote, "The Immigration Regulation", will be delivered by Santiago Yerga Cobos, Director General for Migration, moderated by Blas Jesús Imbroda Ortiz, chair of the Subcommittee and dean of the Melilla bar. Next, José Antonio Ruiz de la Hermosa Gutiérrez, Deputy Director General for Nationality and Civil Status, will address nationality.

The morning will close with a round table on the European Pact on Migration and Asylum, with Marta García Cienfuegos (UNHCR representative) and Noemí Alarcón Velasco, CCBE vice-president and Subcommittee member, moderated by Juan Luis de Aynat Bañón, dean of the Almería bar.

Thursday afternoon workshops

Thursday afternoon features four parallel workshops: residence arrangements (arraigos) after the reform introduced by Royal Decree 316/2026 of 14 April, with officials from the Alicante immigration office; consular immigration practice, with the Ombudsman's Office; the Large Companies and Strategic Collectives Unit, with Luis Esteban Manzanares Fernández Roldán, deputy assistant director at the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration; and the effects of the extraordinary regularisation process, including extensions and modifications.

Friday: injunctions, relatives of Spanish citizens and minors

Friday opens with Francisco Pleite Guadamillas, a judge at the Audiencia Nacional, on interim measures following asylum denials. Then Aurelia Álvarez Rodríguez, professor of Private International Law, and Ana María Uría Pelayo (Cantabria bar) will analyse the new statute for relatives of Spanish citizens.

Friday's workshops cover defence strategies in immigration law — administrative appeals, judicial review and fundamental rights protection — and the legal representation of minors after Supreme Court judgment 131/2026 of 21 January, an issue of particular practical weight for lawyers working with minors in age-assessment procedures.

A dense regulatory context

The conference lands at an especially demanding moment for immigration practice: the 2026 Regulation reform, the launch of the extraordinary regularisation process and the adjustments to residence arrangements and to the procedures for relatives of Spanish citizens have multiplied the casework lawyers face. The presence of senior migration officials — the Director General for Migration, the Nationality deputy directorate, immigration office heads and the Large Companies Unit — makes the event a rare chance to test application criteria directly with those instructing the files.

Registration and practical details

The conference is in person. The technical secretariat is available at jornadasextranjeria@abogacia.es and +34 916 62 46 50, and accommodation information is published on the event page.

For lawyers who practise before the immigration authorities, gatherings of this kind are also the place where the practical criteria of the administration are aired: how files are being processed, which documentary issues generate the most refusals and what changes the coming months will bring.

For autumn planning, our events section keeps tracking the sector calendar, including the 14th National Congress of the Legal Profession in Toledo in 2027, Legal Tech Expo 2026 at IFEMA and the ICAM public procurement conference.