By Baltasar Garzón – Oct 11, 2026There are persecutions that do not need a uniform. A sealed file, a conveniently framed legal qualification, and the trusted cooperation of another state are enough. The case of “Fergie” Chambers is one of them. Under the appearance of an extradition for rioting and money laundering, Washington is seeking to punish an individual for what he said, for whom he helped, and for the cause to which he devoted his money. It does so invoking collective security, a claim that, according to Rawls, does not authorize trampling a person’s inviolability.When James “Fergie” Chambers came to Spain to establish his home, he could not have imagined that the vengeful hand of the Trump government would pursue him here as wel for his ideas. He had left the United States with his passport, with no obstacle placed in his way, and obtained residence permission in Spain in September 2025, at a time when nobody in his country was pursuing him. On July 10, 2026, he was arrested in Ibiza, Spain, at Washington’s request and has been in prison since then. He has spent more than two months deprived of liberty without clearly understanding the basis for that decision.His opposition to the United States government became clear on November 20, 2023, when the war in Gaza was in its first weeks and a group of activists appeared in front of the factory that Elbit Systems, the Israeli armaments group, has in Merrimack (New Hampshire, USA). Four women climbed onto the roof, broke windows, and spilled paint. Chambers stayed below, in the surroundings, where the building could not even be seen, and later spoke to an interviewer from a television program, where he gave his name and explained the reason for the protest. The four women were tried in their state. The New Hampshire prosecutor’s office dropped the serious charges, including rioting, and in November 2024, the accused accepted guilt for two minor offenses, for which they were given one year in prison and for which they served 60 days.The complaint19 months later, on June 30, 2026, when Chambers had been a resident in Spain for nine months, an FBI agent signed a federal complaint against him. It charged Chambers with incitement to riot, which is the charge that New Hampshire courts had dropped against those who caused the damage at Elbit Systems; conspiracy to commit it; and international money laundering. The first two charges actually punish the exercise of freedom of expression: they rest mainly on two messages published on two social media platforms, on the interviews in which he defended the protest, and on the payment of the bonds for the detainees. The third charge is based on some US $7.5 million that he transferred from his account in the United States to another account of his in Tunisia, the country where he then resided.That complaint does not arise in a vacuum. On September 25, 2025, the same month that Chambers obtained his residence in Spain, President Trump signed Presidential National Security Memorandum No. 7 Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence. The text orders the FBI’s joint antiterrorism groups to investigate not only those who commit violent acts but also those who “recruit” or “radicalize” them and those who finance them. It tasks the US Treasury with tracing money flows and the attorney general with prosecuting riots and damage with maximum rigor. Rioting, conspiracy, and tracing of money: those were the charges that, nine months later, were brought against Chambers.On July 16, 2026, six days after Chambers’ arrest in Ibiza, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gathered representatives from more than 65 countries at a conference on the resurgence of “political terrorism” in Washington, DC, USA. The doctrine was being exported, and Spain should not be its first stop.Nor is this an interpretation imposed from outside. On September 30, 2025, the US federal judge William G. Young, appointed by Ronald Reagan, wrote in a 161-page ruling that the Trump administration had applied a policy of detention and deportation of foreign students and professors for their pro-Palestine activism. According to the judge, a few were chosen to be punished publicly, thus silencing everyone else by fear, an open violation of the First Amendment. What a US court has called ideological persecution within its borders cannot, upon crossing the Atlantic, become an ordinary request for judicial cooperation.The origin of the funds and their destination are justified and have nothing to do with terrorist organizations. A judge issued the arrest warrant on June 30, and the file was placed under secrecy, so Chambers had no way of knowing about it. The rulings that have denied him release treat him as a fugitive, even though when he settled in Spain there were no charges that he was fleeing from. The extradition procedure is formal and does not adjudicate the facts. However, it does require examining double criminality, proportionality, and the absence of political motivation, and all these signs should be weighed when deciding to imprison someone.The United States does not accuse Chambers of terrorism, despite having a specific law against those who support terrorist organizations, and in its notice to Interpol, it classified the charges as vandalism and money laundering. Nevertheless, the Spanish Public Prosecutor has presented them as financing terrorism, a qualification that does not appear anywhere in the US documentation. In addition, the pretrial detention orders speak of a sentence in excess of 30 years—this also does not appear in any document from the US, where the maximum mentioned is 20 years.The traceability of the funds is documented: their origin is an inheritance that the United States itself recognizes, and their destination has nothing to do with terrorism. The prosecutor did not find that qualification in the extradition request; it added it. That is a manifest excess, and not an innocent one.The procedureTo locate him, the United States did without the red notice, the international search order that Interpol publishes after its lawyers verify that the matter is not political, military, religious, or racial—areas in which its statutes prohibit it from intervening. Instead, they used a diffusion, a notice that Interpol’s national central office in Washington drafts and sends directly to the countries it chooses, without that prior review. It is the requesting office itself that claims that the request is not political. The notice was aimed at Spain, where they knew that Chambers lived. It was a maneuver to evade the only independent filter in the system.The documentation that arrived later by diplomatic channel does not include the indictment, the formal accusation with which Washington usually accompanies its extradition requests. In the United States, no one can be tried for a felony without a grand jury, formed by citizens, examining the case and approving that accusation. The federal prosecutor in charge of the matter swears under oath that they will go to the grand jury when Spain has delivered Chambers. What is therefore requested is the sending of a person to another continent before knowing whether there will be an indictment against him. Meanwhile, he remains in prison for a charge that no jury has validated.Political dissentSince the 19th century, when liberal states stopped extraditing one another’s dissidents, extradition laws prohibit surrender for political crimes. That is established today in Article 13.3 of the Spanish Constitution, the Passive Extradition Law, and the bilateral treaty with the United States, which also allow refusal when there are well-founded reasons to believe that the requested person is persecuted for their political opinions. That protection has a single exception: terrorism. Therein lies the key to the excess. By labeling as terrorism what Washington does not call so, the Prosecutor closes the only door that the Spanish legal order opens to someone prosecuted for their ideas.The qualification does not describe the facts; it serves to cover up persecution because it turns a dissident into a terrorism suspect against whom one can no longer invoke the political nature of the request. No public prosecutor in the service of legality should lend themself to completing the requesting state’s accusation with what the state has not dared to maintain. Chambers is reproached for what he said, whom he helped, and what he did with his money. Those who caused damages at Elbit Systems left prison after two months, and he, whose role was the least serious, faces three federal charges. The difference is only explained by his role as the public face of a movement in support of Palestine.The riot law applied to him is disputed in his country, where two federal appeals courts have declared it partially unconstitutional for punishing opinions that the Constitution protects, without agreement between them about the conduct of “organizing” that is attributed to him. The accusation about the money does not even fit with its own dates. The United States admit that the funds came from Chambers’ inheritance and infer bad intent from the fact that the transfers coincided with visits to an embassy in Tunisia in April 2024. But the first two transfers, which total more than US $1 million, were made in March. One of the entities that received money was added to Canada and the United States lists in October 2024, when the donation had already been made. Furthermore, among the operations of “international” laundering is a US $20,000 donation to an Arizona association—funds that never left the country. The destination of the other funds was in no case guided by the intention to illicitly finance any organization.Spain recognized the state of Palestine in May 2024, and since September 2025, it has been forbidden, by a law-level rule, to trade defense material with “Israel”. What that group demanded at the gates of the Merrimack factory therefore coincides with the policy that the Spanish state has adopted. It would be an intolerable paradox if Spain handed over, in order to defend it, the one who defended it before it did.The defense asked the Spanish government not to give course to the extradition, and the government has allowed the matter to continue in the courts. The Audiencia Nacional has twice denied bail and must later rule on the surrender. If it denies it, Fergie will have been unjustly imprisoned for several months; if it authorizes it, the final decision will return to the Council of Ministers. The government, even if it is acting in a caretaker capacity, has full power not to hand him over. If it fails to decide, and the next administraation is of a different stripe, it is not unimaginable that the surrender of a dissident would become a first gesture of affinity with Washington.Rawls warned that formal justice, the regular and impartial application of rules, can coexist with substantive injustice. That is the risk of this case: that every procedure is scrupulously followed and that the end result is the surrender of a dissident who is persecuted for his ideas.Fergie Chambers’ Partner Says ‘Pressure From the Zionist Regime Is Extreme’The judges of the Audiencia Nacional are not called upon to judge what happened in Merrimack, but they are called upon to look behind the procedures and to recognize persecution when they have it in front of them. If they do not, the sacrifice of a person who decided to put his means at the service of a just cause simply for disagreeing with someone who, authoritatively, persecutes dissent will have been consummated. (ElDiario.es)Translation: Orinoco TribuneOT/JRE/SL