The three documents partially declassified so far are sufficient. The six judges of the Fourth Section of the Administrative Litigation Chamber of the Supreme Court have rejected the request of the Generalitat of Catalonia to lift the secrecy that weighs, among other documents, on a report prepared by the National Intelligence Center (CNI) last December about the espionage to which he subjected for ten months, between 2019 and 2020, the then vice president and current acting president of the Government, Pere Aragonès (ERC), with the Pegasus program. In an order issued on May 28 to which EL PAÍS has had access, the magistrates endorse the decision that the Government of Pedro Sánchez took in January to provide only three documents to the Barcelona judge Santiago García, who is investigating the complaint presented by Pedro Sánchez himself. Aragonès for this interference.
One of these three documents was the judicial order from July 2019 by which the Supreme Court magistrate Pablo Lucas, responsible for controlling the activities of the secret service, gave the green light to the telephone intervention of the independence leader, who was then vice president of the Government led by by Quim Torra. The CNI had argued before the judge that it did not intend to spy on the institutional communications of the ERC leader, but rather those of a mobile phone other than the one officially assigned to him by his position and that in the past had allegedly been used by someone to coordinate the actions. of the Committees for the Defense of the Republic (CDR), which emerged to defend secession after the illegal 1-O referendum and which on paper had no leaders. Then there were still months before the Supreme Court handed down the sentence that put the leaders of the group in jail. processes and unleashed a wave of protests, some violent, in Catalonia.
The other two declassified documents were judicial resolutions, from October of that same year – coinciding with the protests in response to the Supreme Court ruling – and from January 2020 – in the midst of negotiations for Sánchez’s investiture –, which extended the wiretapping to Aragonès until April. In reality, the Barcelona judge demanded much more information about that interference, since he had required all the documentation that the CNI had at its disposal regarding the purchase and use of the software Israeli-made Pegasus spy and about the “specific people” who, on behalf of the secret service, had bought it. The Government refused to provide this data, arguing that doing so could compromise the security of secret service agents.
The now known decision of the Supreme Court comes after the legal services of the Generalitat presented on March 18 a contentious appeal against the agreement of the Council of Ministers that, on the previous January 16, declassified only these three documents. The Generalitat demanded that the Government “complete the administrative file with the inclusion of the secret report of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) dated December 26, 2023.” In the appeal, he proposed, to overcome the foreseeable reluctance of the magistrates to do so, that this document remain “at the exclusive disposal of the Supreme Court, adopting the measures considered appropriate to safeguard its secret nature.”
That report supposedly details not only the evidence used by the secret service to spy on Aragonès, but also 17 other Catalan independence leaders whose mobile phones were infected with the Pegasus program, as Paz Esteban, former director of the CNI, acknowledged on May 5, 2022 in his appearance before the official secrets commission of Congress. However, the Supreme Court flatly rejects doing so because it considers that “there is no reason to maintain that the aforementioned secret report should be part of the administrative file” that led to the declassification of the three files. The magistrates emphasize that in this file “classified information does not have to be collected, but only the procedures and, where appropriate, the reasons that led only to the decision of partial declassification.”
The high court also rules out accepting the request of the Generalitat to access “any other resolution” of magistrate Pablo Lucas regarding the “intervention of the telephone number owned by the CTTI [Centre de Telecomunicacions i Tecnologies de la Informació] of the Catalan Government Department [que en aquel momento usaba Aragonès] as well as any other information about the actions of the CNI in relation to said telephone number.” The magistrates conclude that this request is not appropriate either “because it is a generic request” and criticize that the legal services of the Generalitat do not explain “why all of this should have been part of the administrative file.”
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He Pegasus case It came to light following a report carried out by Citizen Lab, a group linked to the University of Toronto (Canada) and specialized in cybersecurity. According to this investigation, at least 63 politicians, lawyers and pro-independence activists had had their mobile phones infected with the spyware on key days for the Catalan secessionist movement after 2017. That revelation gave rise to more than a dozen legal actions by of those affected, although Aragonès is the one that has made the most progress.
In July 2022, the Catalan president filed a complaint against the former director of the CNI Paz Esteban and against NSO Group, the Israeli company that owns the Pegasus system. Esteban declared that she was under investigation before the Barcelona judge just after the Government declassified the three documents in January, although at that appearance she did not provide any information about the Pegasus attack on the man’s cell phone. presidenthiding behind the fact that it was information protected by the official secrets law.
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