JERUSALEM – Palestinian lawyer Salah Hamouri, who is in Israeli detention, filed a complaint in France yesterday against surveillance firm NSO Group for having “illegally infiltrated” his mobile phone with the spyware Pegasus.
Hamouri, who also holds French citizenship, is serving a four-month term of administrative detention ordered by an Israeli military court in March on the claim he is a “threat to security”.
He is one of several Palestinian activists whose phones were hacked using the Pegasus malware made by the Israeli company NSO, according to a report in November by human rights groups.
The organisations had tested the phones of members of six Palestinian non-government groups that Israel has named as terrorist organisations, including prisoner advocacy group Addameer, where Hamouri worked.
The groups concluded that six Palestinian activists working for the outlawed organisations had been infected with Pegasus.
On Tuesday, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Human Rights League, and Hamouri filed a complaint with the Paris prosecutor.
It accused NSO of “having illegally infiltrated the telephone of rights defender Salah Hamouri”, they said in a statement sent to the AFP bureau in Jerusalem.
“Obviously, this is an operation that is part of a largely political framework given the harassment Hamouri has been subjected to for years and the attacks on human rights defenders in Israel,” attorney Patrick Baudouin, honorary president of the FIDH, said.
Violation of privacy
The rights groups have filed a complaint alleging offences – such as the violation of privacy and correspondence – to the prosecutor of the Paris judicial court in the hopes of spurring a judicial investigation.
Baudouin said Hamouri holds French nationality and that his phone was allegedly infected with Pegasus prior to his travel to France from April to May 2021, which would make French courts “competent” to judge the case.
A spokesperson for NSO Group told AFP: “NSO does not know who the targets of its governmental customers are.”
“If one of NSO's customers operated against a convicted terrorist in order to investigate or prevent terror activities, this would be an authorised and proper use of the technology and would not be considered as a misuse.”
NSO has faced mounting scrutiny since a consortium of news outlets revealed in July last year that its Pegasus software had been used to spy on the phones of journalists, politicians, activists or business leaders in many countries.
Israel says Hamouri is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which it and the European Union consider a “terrorist” group.
The Palestinian Digital Rights Coalition, which brings together a number of local non-governmental organisations, welcomed the news of the lawsuit against NSO.
The attacks on Hamouri “are part of a broader campaign of Israel to smear, shrink and minimise the space for civil society and human rights work”, it said in a statement yesterday.
It also accused the Jewish state of “delegitimising Palestinian human rights groups and human rights defenders”. – AFP, April 6, 2022
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