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The lawyers of the monitored independentistas also want to investigate whether the National Police or the Civil Guard had the program at their disposal
The independence movement activate the judicial route to get to the bottom of the ‘Catalangate‘. The more than 60 spied on by the Israeli Pegasus software will file multiple complaints against NSO Group, owner of the program, so that the justice system can investigate which government agencies have used their services and determine whether the National Intelligence Center (CNI), the Police National or the Civil Guard is behind the surveillance of sovereignty.
The announcement was made by the lawyers of the spies (Andreu Van den Eynde, Gonzalo Boye, Benet Salellas and Antoni Abat i Ninet), some of them defense attorneys and affected parties, since they appear on the list of holders of telephone devices that were infected according to Citizen Lab. In the Aula Magna of the University of Barcelona (UB), members of ERC, Together and CUPas well as from Cultural Omnium and of the ANC.
Complaints will be addressed to Court of Instruction 32 of Barcelona, who already has an open investigation for a year and a half for the espionage of the former president of the Parliament and now ‘conseller’ of Empresa i Treball Roger Torrent and the ERC councilor in the Catalan capital, Ernest Maragall. This court awaits data from Israel and Ireland after the magistrate sent rogatory commissions to those two countries to try to clarify who hacked the mobile phones of these two Republican leaders. This request for information was addressed to NSO Group, with fiscal domicile in Ireland and owner of WhatsApp, an application that alerted Torrent and Maragall to the computer attack.
In another case opened in California against NSO Group for espionage, the company assured that before selling Pegasus it carries out a buyer’s file to detect improper use and that it subsequently safeguards that human rights are respected. The lawsuits purport to allege that NSO Group has a “lack of control & rdquor; about the use that customers make of its program to discover who used them and, if not enough, that the company be considered a “necessary cooperative” because the information from mobile devices could pass through their terminals before reaching the spying body.
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“We have no doubt that Spanish government agencies have participated,” he said. salellaswhich has demanded that the justice system and the Prosecutor’s Office “not reject their obligation” to investigate “all Spanish government agencies.”
After uncovering that there are dozens of other people under surveillance with the same software, the lawyers trust that the accelerator will be stepped up so that the investigation advances quickly and takes on new coordination, with the aim of clarifying whether it was State agencies that used Pegasus to spy on independence. Van den Eynde He has pointed out that citizens must press for those involved to give explanations and, at the same time, “to take the judges to the corner from which they cannot escape and technically pressure them to investigate”.
“The first legal consequences are going to come from outside the State,” Boye predicted, assuming that espionage of this type is “a textbook crime” and that the echo in Europe may be favorable to the interests of his clients, also of those with open cases in the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), as the ‘expresident’ Carles Puigdemontpending the resolution on his immunity.
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“In Europe it will not be understood that a democratic State spies on the independence movement. No magistrate can justify what is illegal,” he insisted, after the Defense Minister, Margaret Oaksjustify the follow-up techniques by a State when facing the independence challenge.
On the open investigation against the computer scientist who uncovered ‘Catalangate’ Elijah Field for allegedly being behind the Democratic Tsunami, Van den Eynde has insisted that this would not justify surveillance through Pegasus.