The judge of the National High Court Jose Luis Calama has opened proceedings for crime of discovery and disclosure of secrets to proceed to investigate the complaint of the State Attorney for the illegal intrusions suffered in telephones of the President of the Government, Pedro Sanchezand the Defense Minister, Margarita Robles, with Pegasus between the months of May and June 2021.
Its first action has been to request a report from the Public Prosecutor’s Office so that it can rule on the investigative steps it deems appropriate to determine the nature and circumstances of the facts that are the subject of the complaint, as well as the people who have participated in them. Legal sources have highlighted to EL PERIÓDICO the difficulty involved in these investigations given the intrinsic characteristics of espionage itself.
Calama highlights in its order that the complaint by the State attorney, which is considered to be a person representing the injured parties, “is accompanied by two reports from the National Cryptologic Center, referring to the mobile devices of the President of the Government and the Minister of Defence, which respectively show that ‘the mobile device of the President of the Government analyzed was infected by Pegasus on 2 occasions (on May 19, 2021 and May 31, 2021)“, when “device information exfiltration occurred”.
It adds that the phone currently “has no known indicators of ongoing Pegasus infection.” For its part, “the mobile device of the Defense Minister was infected in June 2021″when “device information exfiltration” also occurred and it currently doesn’t seem infected either.
High organizations of the nation
In his order, the magistrate explains that the facts that appear in the complaint of the State Attorney are framed within the crimes that the Penal Code classifies as discovery and revelation of secrets, which are included in the title of the corresponding to the ” crimes against privacy, the right to one’s own image and the inviolability of the home & rdquor ;.
In this sense, remember that these rights safeguard a space of personal and family privacy that is removed from outside interference, highlighting the necessary protection against the growing development of the means and procedures for capturing, disclosing and disseminating information and data and circumstances that pertain to privacy.
The jurisdiction of the National High Court is determined in a “clearly clear” manner, since it is provided for in the Organic Law of the Judiciary when a crime affects “senior bodies of the nation”, such as the President of the Government and the Minister of Defense .
determining origin
With the terms in which the LOPJ is drafted in the hands of other senior officials spied on, such as the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragones, they do not have to be the competence of the National High Court, at least not automatically. Legal sources consulted by EL PERIÓDICO indicated that the application of the exceptionality of a law is always done in a restrictive manner, for which they were in favor of not serving as a basis for accumulation, while it will be decisive that indications appear that the origin of the espionage suffered is the same.
That circumstance, which would mean the accumulation of actions in the National High Court, has been denied by the Executive, which assures that the attack on the Sánchez and Robles terminals and the one that the Catalan independence movement may have suffered -only confirmed by an unofficial entity, Citizen Labs- They are two totally different things.“, despite the coincidence in its discovery or in its diffusion, the moment and that in both cases Pegasus has been used.
Related news
At the moment the complaints filed so far by the ‘Catalangate’ are accumulating in the open procedure in the Court of Instruction number 32 of Barcelona, which investigates similar complaints from the former president of the Parliament and ‘conseller’ of Company, Roger Torrentand the ERC leader in Barcelona, Ernest Maragall and has been waiting for more than a year for information from Israel and Ireland.
Judge Calama was the last instructor of the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils on August 17 and 18, 2017which ended in the conviction of the two members of the terrorist cell who did not die in the attacks and a collaborator, and has been dealing with the bankruptcy of Banco Popular since arriving at the Central Court of Instruction number 4.