The Diplomat
National Court Judge José Luis Calama has ordered the provisional dismissal, for the second time, of the case opened regarding the infection of the mobile devices of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and the Ministers of Defense, Interior, and Agriculture, Margarita Robles, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, and Luis Planas, respectively, with the ‘Pegasus’ malware.
According to a press release from the National Court, the judge considers that “the frustration of the execution” of the letters rogatory by Israel “prevents investigating the attribution of authorship of the investigated acts to any specific person,” which leads the National Court to the provisional dismissal.
Calama initially shelved the investigation in July 2023 and reopened it a few months later to incorporate information provided by French judicial authorities in the proceedings underway in that country regarding the Pegasus malware infection of phones belonging to journalists, lawyers, public figures, and governmental and non-governmental organizations, as well as members of the French government, ministers, and members of parliament.
In his ruling, the judge of the National Court explains that the investigations carried out by his French colleagues have not yielded any new information that would allow for determining the authorship of the investigated acts, which could be classified as crimes of discovery and disclosure of secrets.
The investigating judge emphasizes the frustration of the investigation stemming from the lack of execution of the letters rogatory sent to the Israeli authorities, issued, expanded, and reiterated at various times in recent years, which prevents an investigation “into the attribution of authorship of the investigated criminal acts to any specific person, inevitably leading us to agree to the provisional dismissal of the proceedings due to the lack of a known perpetrator or perpetrators.”
Through this repeatedly issued request for international legal cooperation, the judge intended to obtain information from NSO Group, the company that owns the Pegasus software, and to take a statement from the company’s CEO as a witness.
According to Calama, this situation prevents him from advancing the investigation, as other investigative steps cannot be taken. “This means that the process remains dormant or in a state of latency until information obtained through a possible, and unlikely, fulfillment of the letter rogatory that the State of Israel has obstructed, or new sources of evidence, allow the investigation to continue.”
The procedural situation in which the case finds itself, according to the head of Central Court of Instruction Number Four, is what the Supreme Court describes as “investigative impotence.”
