Spanish court weighs US bid to extradite activist Chambers over Hamas claims

Spain's high court gave the US extradition bid against James “Fergie” Chambers a two-hour airing Friday, and the two sides could not have looked more different. Chambers's defense used most of the session to question the US citizen and pick apart irregularities in the Trump administration's request, while prosecutor Juan Hernández Villalba raced through his case head down — asking Chambers nothing at all. Neither the judges nor the prosecutor asked him about the insinuation in the request that he had backed Hamas. It is the first known instance of the US seeking to extradite a citizen over alleged support for Hamas, an accusation apparently tied to an international money laundering charge and donations to organizations helping Palestinians in Gaza. Chambers has been held since his 10 July arrest in Ibiza.

The defense opened with money. A self-described communist and anti-imperialist, Chambers said he sold stock back to his family's business, Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises, worth about $250m in mid-2023, then launched a foundation. He and its three-member board choose what to fund and screen projects for US sanctions, he told the court. His partner, activist and actor Stella Schnabel, says it has backed an estimated 100 progressive and humanitarian projects in 20 countries — among them, Chambers said, Gaza organizations working on “medical treatment for children, transportation out of dangerous areas and clean water and food”. At one point he noted that his family's next-door neighbor in Tunis was the US ambassador.

Two of the request's three charges — riot and conspiracy to riot — stem from late-2023 protests against Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Chambers walked the court through his part: locking himself to a door, marching in the street, and in New Hampshire standing in the road and speaking to the media. He also paid bail for four protesters who were eventually convicted of misdemeanors and served 30 days.

On the $7.2m the US flags, the defense called financial expert Albert Deulofeu Schilt to walk through ten bank transfers from the US to Tunisia in 2024, where Chambers was living. Most of the money, they said, sponsored the football club Club Africain — “one of the largest football clubs in Africa”, per Chambers — and a sporting business he launched there. Defense attorney Aitor Martínez asked whether there was any indication the cash supported terrorist activity. “None,” Deulofeu Schilt replied.

Hernández Villalba then spent about 15 minutes painting the opposite picture in rapid-fire monotone: Chambers backing “an organized structure … aimed at repeatedly committing illegal acts … together with funds destined for terrorist organizations”. The defense had presented the facts “in a fragmented way”, he said, when “what's most relevant is an evaluation of the whole picture”. The extradition petition, he insisted, “isn't based on ideology or political statements, but on actions [Chambers] organized, financed and carried out, causing material damage”. The Elbit actions “were presented as a simple protest”, he said, yet were “planned for days … with objectively violent content”, leaving “more than enough indications” that the funding was aimed at terrorism. A week after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, Chambers had posted on X that Israel's response was “simply genocide” and that no faction of the Palestinian resistance had done “anything wrong”.

Irish film-maker and journalist Sinéad O'Shea, whose documentary on Chambers, All About the Money, premieres in New York this weekend, watched the hearing on the court's YouTube channel along with 100-plus others. She called the case “a false narrative”, said she had seen the Tunisian football club herself and that his donations are public record, adding: “It is impossible not to see this as a politically motivated case.” Chambers got the last word, telling the panel he cannot understand why he has been jailed since July “for what amounts to speaking emotionally and committing minor offenses of public disturbance”, that he has “never had any contact with any terrorist organization”, that he missed his grandmother's funeral and that his wife is due to give birth in March. The court decides next week; if it says yes, Spain's council of ministers can reverse the ruling — making this potentially one of the last calls of Pedro Sánchez's government before national elections on 29 November.