Court to rule next week on bid to return activist to US charges
The defense and the prosecution offered the three-judge panel two irreconcilable accounts of the same events. Chambers’s lawyers spent most of the session questioning Chambers and cataloguing alleged irregularities in the Trump administration’s extradition request — several of which the Guardian has reported on — as well as the figures of Spanish law that would lead the three-judge panel to deny the request, while prosecutor Juan Hernández Villalba moved through his case in about 15 minutes of rapid-fire monotone without asking Chambers a single question.
The defense’s queries did allow Chambers to speak for the first time since his 10 July arrest in Ibiza about events at the center of the case: the 2023 protests against Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and the 2024 transfers of $7.2m to Tunisia, where he lived at the time. Neither the judges nor the prosecutor asked Chambers to address the request’s insinuation that he had supported Hamas. On the whole, Chambers painted a picture different from the depiction contained in the extradition request, that of a violent backer of Hamas on the run from the US.
Two of the request’s three charges — riot and conspiracy to riot — concern late-2023 protests against Elbit in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Chambers, a self-described communist and anti-imperialist, told the court he locked himself to a door, marched in the street, and in New Hampshire stood in the road speaking to the media and paid bail for four protesters who were eventually found guilty of misdemeanor charges and served 30 days in jail.
Chambers said he sold stock back to his family’s business, Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises, worth about $250m in mid-2023, then started a foundation. He and the foundation’s three-member board decide on funding and ensure that no projects seeking support are under US sanctions, Chambers said. His partner, activist and actor Stella Schnabel, said the foundation has funded an estimated 100 progressive and humanitarian projects in 20 countries.
On the $7.2m in 2024 transfers to Tunisia, where Chambers lived at the time, the defense and a financial expert witness laid out how ten bank transfers from the US mostly went to sponsor Club Africain — described by Chambers as “one of the largest football clubs in Africa” — and a sporting business he launched. “Is there any indication that the money went to support terrorist activities?” asked defense attorney Aitor Martínez. “None,” said financial expert Albert Deulofeu Schilt.
Chambers told the court his foundation has also funded organizations in Gaza working on issues such as “medical treatment for children, transportation out of dangerous areas and clean water and food”. He noted at one point that his family’s next-door neighbor in Tunis was the US ambassador.
The prosecutor described a different case entirely. Hernández Villalba said the request concerned Chambers backing “an organized structure … aimed at repeatedly committing illegal acts … together with funds destined for terrorist organizations”. He accused the defense of laying out the facts “in a fragmented way … when what’s most relevant is an evaluation of the whole picture”, and asserted that “the extradition petition isn’t based on ideology or political statements, but on actions [Chambers] organized, financed and carried out, causing material damage”.
Hernández Villalba said the actions against Elbit “were presented as a simple protest”, but “nevertheless, the actions described by the US were planned for days … with objectively violent content”. He concluded that “there are more than enough indications to consider … that [Chambers’s] funding was aimed at terrorism”.
More than 100 people in varying time zones followed the hearing on the court’s YouTube channel, including Irish film-maker and journalist Sinéad O’Shea, whose documentary on Chambers, All About the Money, makes its New York premiere this weekend. The film covers the period cited in the FBI affidavit underpinning the US request. O’Shea said the extradition case “builds a false narrative which begins with the protest in New Hampshire – a piece of vandalism at worst and for which people ended up serving 30 days. I saw myself the football club in which he invested in Tunisia and his donations to Palestinian and other charities are a matter of public record. It is impossible not to see this as a politically motivated case.”
Chambers has been extensively profiled in US media for his views. A week after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, he posted on X about Israel’s response: “Stop calling it ‘collective punishment’/There’s nothing to be ‘punished’ for/No faction of the Palestinian resistance, Hamas or other, has done anything wrong/It’s simply genocide/Like it has been.”
Chambers, dressed in dark jeans, a grey-blue shirt and a black jacket, with a close-cropped haircut and mustache, got the last word at the hearing. “To this day I cannot understand why I have been in prison since July for what amounts to speaking emotionally and committing minor offenses of public disturbance,” he said.
“I’ve never had any contact with any terrorist organization. I’ve certainly never financed any terrorist organization … and for this my family has been torn apart. I missed my grandmother’s funeral last week. My five-year-old son asks where I am every day. And my wife will give birth, God willing, in March – and I don’t know if I will be by her side.”
“[All] because I have spoken my mind, and I had a lot more money than others who have spoken their mind, in my country. And that’s all it amounts to.”
The court will decide next week on extraditing Chambers. If the decision is affirmative, Spain’s council of ministers can reverse it — meaning Chambers’s extradition may be among the last decisions made under Pedro Sánchez, the socialist prime minister, before national elections on 29 November.