The Supreme Court has endorsed the Government’s decision to declassify only part of the information on the Israeli spy program Pegasus. The Administrative Litigation Chamber has rejected the Generalitat’s appeal against the agreement of the Council of Ministers, which, on January 16, 2023, lifted the secret about the espionage suffered, between 2019 and 2020, by the mobile phone of the former leader of the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), who was then vice president of the Generalitat, but did not declassify other documents that he had claimed on his phone.
The agreement of the Council of Ministers only included the declassification of three documents, among them, the judicial order of 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 Aragonès, who was then vice president of the Government led by Quim Torra.
The CNI had argued before the judge that it did not intend to spy on the institutional communications of the independence leader, but rather those of another telephone that was assigned to it and that in the past had allegedly been used by someone, arising to defend secession after the illegal 1-O referendum. The other two declassified documents were two judicial resolutions, from October 2019 — coinciding with the protests in response to the Supreme Court ruling that condemned the independence leaders — and from January 2020 ——, which extended the wiretapping of Aragonès until April.
But the Barcelona judge had demanded much more information, since he requested 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 had bought it on behalf of the Spanish secret service. The Government refused to provide this data on the grounds that doing so could compromise the security of the secret service agents and the Generalitat appealed that decision. The ruling now issued by the Supreme Court rejects that appeal and endorses the decision of the Council of Ministers.
“It is not difficult to understand that the declassification requested, given the circumstances of the case and its extensive content, would reveal, making evident, the means generally available to the Spanish intelligence services, revealing the nature and scope of these, exposing the means, people, and procedures available to these services. So that its consequences would be projected not only on the reduction of their effectiveness, but on the creation of zones of risk that place the State and its citizens in a situation of undeniable vulnerability,” states the Supreme Court ruling, for which Judge Pilar Teso was the speaker.
The judges point out that the declassification of these details “could also compromise foreign intelligence services in general, and in particular with respect to the Israeli companies cited in the request for evidence and their State of origin.” “The expressed declassification would translate, in this case, into a breach of the general interests given the impossibility of action by the intelligence services to fulfill the functions that they are legally entrusted with when they must prevent and avoid any danger, threat or aggression against the independence or territorial integrity of Spain, the national interests and the stability of the rule of law and its institutions,” warns the court, adding: “In short, it would not “only the safety of the CNI agents, but the safety of all citizens and the very permanence of the rule of law.”
