The Public Prosecutor’s Office has agreed to review a complaint filed against the Auxiliary Railway Company (CAF) for its involvement in the construction and maintenance of two Israeli tram lines within the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The decision responds to a complaint filed by six civil society organizations against the board of directors of the Basque company, arguing that its involvement in the “Jerusalem Transportation Master Plan,”
an Israeli project that involves the installation and maintenance of 27 kilometers of railway tracks in areas annexed by settlers, violates the norms of international humanitarian law recognized in the Geneva Convention and two articles of the Spanish Penal Code. The organizations filing the complaint are Novact, the Palestinian Community of Catalonia, the Committee for Solidarity with the Arab Cause, Observatori Desca, Peace with Dignity, and Suds, represented by the Guernica 37 Center. “CAF is reaping huge profits from the occupation policy and the apartheid regime suffered by the Palestinian people. We believe there is corporate liability for these criminal offenses, and in the face of the silence of governments and institutions, we have decided to take the initiative,” a member of Suds — one of the organizations that filed the complaint with the Prosecutor’s Office to ensure it is subsequently addressed in court — told CTXT.
Specifically, they focus their accusation on the direct or indirect responsibility that the railway company’s projects bear for the forced displacement of the Palestinian population and the consolidation of a regime that combines racial segregation with inhumane practices.
CAF, headquartered in Beasain (Gipuzkoa), was already singled out last year in the report “From the Economy of Occupation to the Economy of Genocide” prepared by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese as one of the transnational corporations most economically benefited by the policy of illegal settlements promoted by the Israeli government in Palestine. “The Basque company joined a consortium with an Israeli firm — Shapir Engineering and Industry Ltd — listed in the database of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to maintain and expand the Red Line of the Jerusalem light rail and build the new Green Line, at a time when other companies had withdrawn due to international pressure. “These lines connect the settlements with West Jerusalem,” the rapporteur notes in her report.In 2022, the National Contact Point (PNC) — the body responsible for mediating conflicts caused by the inappropriate conduct of multinational corporations — acknowledged that CAF’s operations in occupied Palestine constitute “a clear violation of international law.”
However, it also admitted its inability to resolve the issue since, under current regulations, there are no rules requiring corporations to comply with international law. This is what experts call the “legal architecture of impunity,” an asymmetrical regulatory structure where corporate interests take precedence over their obligations. To legitimize this, they rely on a dense network of legal protection that spans from their own governments — with economic security policies — to host countries, which deregulate laws to favor foreign economic activity, and to arbitration tribunals, whose binding decisions always end up favoring transnational corporations.
The Prosecutor’s Office has accepted the complaint precisely to verify whether the investments that the Basque railway construction company began in 2019 with the Jerusalem light rail fall within the criminal jurisdiction of the Spanish justice system and violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the displacement of the population in a context of illegal occupation. In 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that not only is the Israeli military presence in the Palestinian territories illegal, but so are the settler colonies and the control they exercise over infrastructure and resources.
CAF’s defense is that its inclusion on the OHCHR blacklist last September for its complicity with the Israeli apartheid regime “is incompatible with the reality of the operations” it carries out on the ground. As the company stated in a press release issued immediately after learning of its inclusion in the UN database, its Jerusalem tram project is strictly technical and neutral. “It provides essential public transportation infrastructure that benefits all communities equally and without discrimination, and that enables the exercise of fundamental human rights,” it explains. The Basque multinational also asserts that it “has never participated in or contributed to any of the activities” attributed to it, and argues that the information published by OHCHR lacks legal standing. “However, its use as a politicized tool risks undermining confidence in a mechanism designed for transparency, not for the imposition of sanctions,” CAF states in the press release.
The Jerusalem Light Rail is one of the most important projects underpinning the city’s urban transformation, designed by the Israeli transportation authority, the so-called ‘Jerusalem Transportation Master Plan Team’ (JTMT). In 2019, a tender was issued to award the construction of various tram lines, which was won by the “TransJerusalem J-Net Ltd” consortium, comprising CAF and the Israeli company Shapir. The cost of the project exceeds 1.8 billion euros. The project aims to integrate the illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem with the urban core of the West, but it does not rule out the establishment, maintenance, and expansion of new rail lines to Israeli settlements — occupations — on Palestinian land.
By connecting different areas of the city — many of which were seized from the Palestinian population — the tram has become the main backbone of various illegal settlements scattered throughout Jerusalem, consolidating, in the view of civil society organizations, “a dual urban reality based on the systematic discrimination against the Palestinian population.”
An example of the priorities of the light rail project in which CAF is participating is the distribution of stations. Approximately 83 per cent of those built on the 6.8-kilometre-long Red Line serve Israeli settlements. In total, there are 33 stops in occupied territories compared to the 6 that serve exclusively Palestinian neighbourhoods.
Those planned for the 20-kilometer Green Line, still under construction, will be even more restrictive for the indigenous population, as they will have only two stations and will be located in the vicinity of several illegal settlements.
The contract that JTMT signed with the Basque business group’s consortium also includes the design and supply of 114 new trams for the future Green Line and the refurbishment of 46 units currently in service on the Red Line. In addition, CAF supplies equipment for the signaling, power, and communication systems across the entire rail network, and is responsible for the operation and maintenance of both lines for the next 15 years in the case of the Red Line, and 25 years for the Green Line. The Basque group’s investment in this project exceeds 500 million euros, but it estimates that the project will generate revenue of nearly one billion euros. The fact that its name appears in Francesa Albanese’s report on the economy of occupation and genocide has not taken too heavy a toll on CAF. In Oslo, they have secured a contract worth over 150 million euros to supply 20 metro cars. In Barcelona, they have reached an agreement with TMB to refurbish 34 cars on lines L3 and L5 for 82.2 million euros. In Bogotá, however, they were excluded from the bidding process for the second metro line, and in Portugal they lost the bid to the French firm Alstom for the largest train construction contract in the country’s history, valued at over 800 million euros. Despite all this, CAF’s order book increased by more than two billion euros between 2023 and 2025, while profits reached a record high of 146 million euros last year.
