In a surprising turn of events, Spain’s highest criminal court has once again shelved its investigation into the use of the Israeli-made Pegasus spyware to target the mobile phones of senior Spanish government officials, including the Prime Minister. The decision, announced on Thursday, cites a chronic lack of cooperation from the Israeli authorities, which the court says has violated “the principle of good faith” between the two countries.
The investigation began in May 2022, after the Spanish government revealed that the phones of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Defence Minister Margarita Robles had been infected with the spyware the previous year. It was later established that the phones of the Interior Minister and the Agriculture Minister had also been targeted.
The revelations led to the dismissal of Spain’s spy chief, Paz Esteban, and the admission that there had been “shortcomings” within the country’s national intelligence centre (CNI).
In his decision, Judge José Luis Calama at the Audiencia Nacional in Madrid said the investigation into the use of Pegasus was being dropped for the second time due to the continued lack of cooperation from Israel. He stated that the Israeli authorities’ failure to respond to requests for information, in the form of letters rogatory, had impeded “the investigation into the attribution of the authorship of the investigated facts to any specific person”.
Calama noted that Israel’s failure to respond to his requests violated two international legal agreements it had signed, and he said its behaviour in the Pegasus case “disrupts the balance inherent in international cooperation and violates the principle of good faith that should govern relations between states”.
The judge had originally closed the investigation in July 2023 but reopened it a few months later after the French authorities provided information on the use of Pegasus to infect the mobile phones of French ministers, MPs, lawyers and journalists. However, this week’s ruling states that the material received from France did not contain any new information that would have allowed him to identify who had used Pegasus to target the Spanish politicians.
Calama expressed his frustration with the Israeli authorities’ repeated failure to respond to his inquiries, which had included a request to take a statement from NSO’s chief executive. Without such cooperation, the judge said, his investigation “remains dormant … until information obtained through a possible, and unlikely, fulfilment of the letter rogatory that the state of Israel has obstructed, or until new sources of evidence [emerge], allowing the investigation to continue”.
In a statement sent to the Guardian when news of the targeting broke, NSO Group said its “firm stance on these issues is that the use of cyber tools in order to monitor politicians, dissident, activists and journalists is a severe misuse of any technology and goes against the desired use of such critical tools”. The company said it was committed to investigating “any suspicion of misuse, and will cooperate and assist with any governmental investigation of these issues”.
However, NSO also stated that it “is a software provider, the company does not operate the technology nor is privy to the collected data. The company does not and cannot know who the targets of its customers are, yet implements measures to ensure that these systems are used solely for the authorised use.”
The Pegasus spyware scandal has raised serious concerns about the potential abuse of such powerful surveillance technology, and the Spanish court’s decision to halt the investigation due to a lack of cooperation from Israel is likely to further fuel these concerns.
