The Supreme Court (TS) has rejected the appeal filed by the former president of the Generalitat Quim Torra for processing, considering that the National Court (AN) “has provided objective data, not mere indications”, which show that he was not a victim of “political espionage” by the Spanish government through the National Intelligence Center with the Pegasus system (CNI), as alleged by the pro-independence leader.
Torra, along with other Catalan leaders, insisted that he had been the victim of “intervention, listening, theft, collection, treatment, use, dissemination and/or storage of information and communications by the Government of Spain and the General State Administration” . And he stressed that such actions were attributable to the director of the CNI.
The former president first went before the National Court, which dismissed his first appeal considering that “there was no administrative file or actions by the Ministry of Defense or the CNI” that confirmed Torra’s version and allowed the judicial body to act. Thus, the AN dismissed the appeal by ruling out the “hypothesis of listening to the CNI and obtaining information through the intervention of corporate mobile phones.”
Faced with this decision, Torra decided to take the case before the Supreme Court: he alleged that the cases of “political espionage” by the Government numbered “by dozens” and that the high court had not yet analyzed the actions of espionage or violation of rights fundamental from the point of view of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by the former president of the Generalitat in his case against espionage with Pegasus.
The Supreme Court magistrates have dismissed the leader’s arguments, considering that they are presented “abstractly without displaying concrete argumentation.” The Supreme Court says that the proposal of an “indiscriminate and improper” use of espionage without authorization had no evidence, not even “indications”, “as stated in the contested resolution” of the National Court. In this sense, they have stressed that Torra’s “approach” is “not related to the reasons set forth in the resolution” of the National Court.
Specifically, the Contentious-Administrative Chamber has concluded that the former president’s statement that he was spied on by the CNI “was devoid of any evidence, even evidence.” And it has ensured that the decision of the National Court to reject the appeal is in line with the right to a fair and equitable process contained in the European Convention on Human Rights, while it has stressed that said resolution was “especially motivated”, until the extreme that Torra did not claim before the Supreme Court that the decision of the AN was “arbitrary or unmotivated”.
In the resolution, for which the magistrate Antonio Fonseca-Herrero has been a rapporteur, the Supreme Court has agreed to impose the procedural costs on Torra “up to the limit of 2,000 euros for all concepts, plus VAT if applicable.”
