The Court of Barcelona has ordered the city’s investigating court 20 to take a statement from the director of the CNI, Esperanza Casteleiro, as testimony in the case it is investigating as a result of a complaint by the ERC MEP Diana Riba and the president of ERC in Parliament, Josep Maria Jové, for having been spied on with the Pegasus software of the Israeli company NSO Group.
According to the order to which La Vanguardia has had access, the investigator dismissed the proceedings that Riba and Jové had requested, considering them “useless” and now the Barcelona Court partially upholds the appeal of the complainants and orders them to be carried out. Among them is requesting information from the CNI on the purchase and use of the Pegasus software from NSO, although only in relation to the espionage suffered by the complainants. The magistrates also summoned the judge to take a statement from the complainants as harmed by the crime and “first-person knowledge of the facts under investigation”, as well as the interlocutor of one of the conversations that were “illegally recorded”.
Casteleiro’s statement, the court considers, “would not be prospective” as the Prosecutor’s Office maintains, but “necessary to determine if the action that was carried out with the spyware in his case was in accordance with current legislation, with the legal limits and with authorization judicial”. The court recalls that the law of prior judicial control of the CNI establishes that the director must request judicial authorization from the Supreme Court (TS), for which reason the judges point out that, if Pegasus was used in accordance with this law, “this use would not be illicit”.
The Court also considers that the “first and mandatory” procedure to practice in this case is to take a statement from the NSO company, against which the complaint by Jové and Riba is directed, to which the prosecutor opposed because he understood that the Spanish jurisdiction It would only be competent over them if the production or sale of the computer program had been “verified” in Spanish territory. For the court, however, the facts that are the subject of the complaint are “the recording or interception of communications to the two plaintiffs who are Spanish and were therefore in Spain, regardless of where the message that gives rise to the infection is sent. with the software, the investigation is the responsibility of the Spanish judges and courts”. In addition, it sees it as “contradictory” to admit a complaint because it considers that the facts that are the subject of the same “are criminal and have been committed by a natural or legal person and deny the basic procedure of taking a statement from the defendant.”
Of course, the Court does not see “compatible with the guarantees of the process and the right of defense” to require NSO to “provide all the documentation that relates to the private accusation and later request its declaration as investigated”, so it requests that ” the defendant entity is previously informed of its condition and the facts attributed to it and is limited to these and not to a prospective investigation”.
Another of the procedures agreed by the Court, and to which the complainants opposed, is that Jové and Riba hand over the attacked mobile phones in order to carry out an “analysis and a judicial expert report” on the alleged espionage. The room assumes that it is possible that traces of espionage are no longer found on these mobiles given the “typology” of the Pegasus software and the time elapsed since they were attacked -year 2019- but maintains that they must be made available to the Central Unit of computer crimes of the Mossos or the one that the judge determines to be analyzed.
The Court also urges the investigator to resolve whether this case should be added to the one before the trial court number 32 of Barcelona on spying on the cell phones of the Minister of Business and Labor Roger Torrent and the Barcelona councilor Ernest Maragall, both from ERC. The room considers that the accumulation would be “pertinent” to avoid the reiteration of “complex investigation proceedings, affecting on the one hand commercial entities based in other countries and, on the other, public institutions such as the CNI”.
On April 18 of last year, Citizen Lab, an organization attached to the University of Toronto, published a report in which it denounced massive espionage on the Catalan independence movement and pointed out that 65 people from this environment would have been spied on with this Israeli-made spyware or with another similar called Candiru. The independence movement baptized this episode of massive espionage as Catalangate, but shortly after the Government announced that the President of the Executive, Pedro Sánchez, the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, and the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande Marlaska, were also spied on with that same system. , after which the director of the CNI, Paz Esteban, was dismissed and replaced by Esperanza Casteleiro.
Of these 65 supposedly spied on, the CNI then recognized that it spied on 18 people with judicial authorization. These 18 spies recognized by the CNI are the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, when he was vice-president and national coordinator of ERC; Jordi Sànchez, former general secretary of Together for Catalonia; Carles Riera, deputy of the CUP; Elisenda Paluzie, former president of the ANC; Marcel Mauri, former vice-president of Omnium; Jordi Bosch de Borja, member of the Òmnium board; Gonzalo Boye, Carles Puigdemont’s lawyer; Joan Matamala, friend of the former president; Josep Lluís Alay, head of the Waterloo Office; Xavier Vendrell, entrepreneur and former ERC advisor; Elsa Artadi, former vice-president and ex-leader of Together in Barcelona; Albert Batet, deputy of Junts; David Bonvehí, president of PDECat; Marc Solsona, deputy general secretary of PDECat and mayor of Mollerussa; Sergi Miquel Gutiérrez, director of the technical structure of the House of the Republic; and Jordi Baylina, Pau Escrich and Xavier Vives, technology entrepreneurs.
