The European Parliament will set up a commission of inquiry into the scandal caused by Pegasus. This software has been used by EU governments to spy on European personalities, politicians, journalists and elected officials.
“The seriousness of the Pegasus scandal cannot be underestimated,” said Dutch Liberal lawmaker Sophie in’t Veld (Renew), who is expected to be the committee’s rapporteur, on Tuesday. The committee will investigate whether the use of spyware breached EU law and fundamental rights. The report should be adopted in a year, says the Renew group.
‘The fact that EU commissioners are being targeted, perhaps by EU governments, only exacerbates an already serious situation. We have to get to the bottom of it,’ she said. The European Commissioner for Justice, the Belgian Didier Reynders, would be among the European officials spied on thanks to Pegasus.
‘No place for espionage’
The scandal has experienced a new twist in Spain where the Catalan independence movement accused the government on Monday of having used this software to spy on the cell phones of dozens of its leaders between 2017 and 2020.
‘In a democratic Europe, there should be no place for espionage,’ protested Catalan MEP Carles Puigdemont during a press conference in Brussels.
The former regional president, who fled to Belgium to escape Spanish justice following Catalonia’s secession attempt in October 2017, was not directly spied on, but many of his relatives, including his wife, have summer. Mr. Puigdemont has called for legal action once morest the Spanish government, which on Tuesday denied any espionage.
‘European issue’
Questioned, the European Commission declared Tuesday that it had no competence to deal with the intelligence activities of the Member States. ‘We rely on independent judiciaries to deal with the actions of their governments,’ said one of its spokespersons.
The European Parliament refutes the argument. ‘The question is European and the challenge is European. We cannot leave this to the discretion of the Member States, which will stifle the scandal,’ denounced the German environmentalist MEP Hannah Neumann, during another press conference, organized by the Greens group.
“We must arm ourselves (…), develop a European normative framework to prevent this scandal from continuing, and determine what can or cannot be used,” added his Spanish counterpart Diana Riba i Giner. Greens in the European Parliament call for a ban on spyware.
‘First stage’
‘Ideally, the work of this commission of inquiry should be the first step towards regulating the international sale and use of spyware technology, as well as the conclusion of legally binding non-spying agreements for the public and private sectors within friendly democracies’, explained the German liberal MEP Moritz Körner (FDP), appointed Tuesday to the vice-presidency of the commission of inquiry.
The Pegasus software from Israeli manufacturer NSO is able to read all data from mobile phones attacked in this way. It can also turn on the device’s camera and microphone without the user noticing.
/ATS