No Ethics In Big Tech — Jurisdiction Series, Part Four of Four
Published 22 August 2026 · ForeverPeaceNow.com / NoEthicsInBigTech.com
This is the last of four jurisdiction posts, and it is the one where I have to correct my own campaign.
The correction first
My petition to the Spanish Government and Prosecutor’s Office rests part of its argument on universal jurisdiction and on the killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers, on the basis that the organisation was founded by a Spanish citizen.
Having gone through the case law properly, I no longer think that argument works, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to protect a document I wrote.
José Couso was a Spanish citizen killed in Baghdad. Spanish nationality of the victim was not enough after the 2014 reform of Article 23.4 LOPJ. The Constitutional Court dismissed his family’s amparo in 2019. The European Court of Human Rights declared their application inadmissible in July 2024, finding the Spanish restrictions legitimate. And in March 2026 the Criminal Chamber of the Audiencia Nacional dismissed a Gaza war-crimes complaint precisely because the Article 23.4(a) conditions were not met.
So a filing built on that argument gets archived in weeks, and takes the credibility of everything after it down too. The petition remains what it always was — a record of global demand, signed by people who wanted an investigation opened. How Spain investigates is Spain’s prerogative. But the legal argument is in the memorandum, not in the petition, and where they differ the memorandum governs.
What actually works: territoriality
Article 23.1 LOPJ gives Spanish courts jurisdiction over offences committed on Spanish territory. And in February 2005 the Supreme Court adopted the principio de ubicuidad: an offence is committed in every jurisdiction where any element of it took place, and the judge in any of them who opens proceedings first is in principle competent.
That doctrine was developed for offences committed over the internet, where the conduct and the effect happen in different places. It maps onto distributed cloud infrastructure without any strain at all.
What it requires is an investigating court finding out what was contracted, engineered, supported or routed through Spain. Which is exactly what a court can do and a campaigner cannot.
The thing Spain has that nowhere else does
In the Netherlands you need a directly interested party. In France you need a partie civile. In Ireland you need the Director of Public Prosecutions to agree, and there is no appeal if he does not.
In Spain, any Spanish citizen can start a criminal case without having been harmed at all. Article 125 of the Constitution, and Articles 101 and 270 of the Ley de Enjuiciamiento Criminal: all Spanish citizens, whether or not injured by the offence, may bring a querella exercising the acción popular.
The requirements are real but manageable. Spanish nationality. Full civil rights. No double conviction for calumnious complaint. A lawyer and a procurador. A formal querella. And — because an acusador popular is not the injured party — a bond, fixed by the court, under Article 280 LECrim.
And the limitation you should know before you start. Supreme Court doctrine limits what a popular accusation can do at the end of a case: it cannot generally force an oral trial where neither the Fiscalía nor a private accusation supports the charge. It is a strong instrument for getting an investigation opened and pursued, and a weak one for forcing a trial. Since what this case needs first is an evidence preservation order, that trade is worth making.
Where Spain is genuinely weak, and I am not hiding it
Article 31 bis of the Código Penal makes legal persons criminally liable only for offences on a closed list. International crimes are not on it. Spain cannot prosecute the company for genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. Only individuals.
That is not a pleading problem anyone can draft around. It is structural, and it is the biggest difference between Spain and the Netherlands, where corporate criminal liability applies to these offences in principle. If your objective is to reach the company, Spain is the wrong venue and you should use The Hague.
There is also no public admission placing any of this in Spain. Microsoft’s September 2025 statement names the Netherlands. It does not name Spain.
One route I am flagging without overselling it
Real Decreto-ley 10/2025, published in the BOE on 24 September 2025 and convalidated by the Congreso on 8 October by 178 votes to 169, is titled as adopting urgent measures against the genocide in Gaza. It prohibits exports to and imports from Israel of defence material and dual-use products and technologies, and denies transit authorisations including for JP-4, JP-5 and JP-8 fuels.
Whether cloud and AI services fall inside the controlled annexes is a technical classification question, and I do not know the answer. Nobody should advance an argument on it without a classification opinion. But if the answer is yes, it is a domestic offence with a clean Spanish territorial nexus and a far lower evidential threshold than complicity in atrocity. It deserves a proper look.
What I have and what I do not
ParentsPlea.com is a casualty documentation resource built from Palestinian Ministry of Health data and independent research by my own team. It can support identifying victims, incidents and dates. It does not confer standing on anyone.
In Spain that matters less than anywhere else in this series, because the acción popular does not require the complainant to have been injured. What is needed is a Spanish citizen or a Spanish legal person willing to act, with counsel and a procurador, able to meet the bond. That is a much easier ask than finding a Palestinian family able to litigate in Europe.
One thing about who I am
I am a United States person. In September 2025 the US Treasury designated three Palestinian human rights organisations on the SDN list under Executive Order 14203, blocking their property in US jurisdiction and prohibiting transactions by US persons. I do not engage with those organisations and this project does not.
That constrains me, not Spanish lawyers. Everything in the memorandum is built from published court decisions, published legislation and published journalism.
How to get the memorandum
The full memorandum — the territoriality analysis, the ubiquity doctrine, the acción popular requirements and the Botín limitation, the Article 31 bis gap, the Real Decreto-ley 10/2025 assessment, the honest weaknesses, every source with a live link — is not posted publicly.
Use the contact form at NoEthicsInBigTech.com and ask for the Spain memorandum. I will send it. I would rather it reached people who intend to use it than sat where anyone can scrape it.
If you are a Spanish citizen, or a Spanish organisation, and you would consider acting as acusador popular, that is the single most useful message I could receive on any of this.
The three things behind this work
The petition to the Spanish Government and Prosecutor’s Office — a record of global demand for an investigation. Available via actionnetwork.org or ForeverPeaceNow.com/Petition
ParentsPlea.com — the casualty record, compiled from Palestinian Ministry of Health data and my team’s own research.
NoEthicsInBigTech.com — the book, the company fact sheets, and the underlying research corpus.
As of 5 August 2026 the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported 73,381 people killed and 174,231 injured in the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023, including 1,254 killed since the ceasefire took effect on 10 October 2025, with an unknown number of victims remaining beneath rubble or in areas emergency responders have been unable to reach. Independent peer-reviewed research published in The Lancet Global Health indicates that figure is a conservative floor rather than an overcount.
Research credit: legal research, source verification and drafting support by Claude (Anthropic). All sources checked 22 August 2026. Not legal advice; I am not a lawyer.