Palestinian-French lawyer sues Israeli spyware firm over phone hacking

A Palestinian lawyer and human rights activist, who holds French citizenship, has filed a complaint in France against the infamous Israeli spyware firm NSO Group for illegal surveillance of his mobile phone.

Salah Hamouri is one of the several activists whose phones were hacked using NSO’s Pegasus software.

The complaint was jointly lodged by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Human Rights League (LDH) and Hamouri on Tuesday with the prosecutor of the Paris judicial court, accusing NSO of having illegally infiltrated his phone.

Hamouri is currently serving a four-month term of administrative detention ordered by an Israeli military court in March over the accusation of being a “threat to security.”

Lawyer Patrick Baudouin, FIDH honorary president, said, “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.”

Baudouin told AFP that French courts are “competent” to judge the case because the Palestinian activist holds French nationality and his phone was infected with Pegasus prior to his travel to France from April to May 2021.

According to Palestinian NGO Addameer, Hamouri has been targeted by Israeli occupation authorities over the past years, made subject to arbitrary arrests, administrative detention without charge, and travel bans. 

In October 2021, the Israeli interior minister issued a decision to revoke Hamouri's permanent al-Quds residence card.

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The Palestinian Digital Rights Coalition (PDRC) said in a statement that it supported the legal action against NSO “for illegally infiltrating the phone of Salah Hamouri, a violation that was initiated in Palestine and continued on French soil. It constitutes a violation of the right to privacy under French law and international human rights conventions.”

“Through the use of several systematic illegal policies, practices and techniques, Israel has entrenched its invasion of Palestinians' right to privacy, and control over everyday life, infringing on the rights to privacy, liberty and personal security and dignity, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights including Article 12, and core international human rights conventions,” it added.

“The use of Israeli NSO Group's Pegasus spyware - which has been blacklisted in countries including the US for being used as a ‘tool to maliciously target government officials, journalists, business people, activists, academics, and embassy workers’- is only one example of multiple technologies Israel is producing and using to target and surveil Palestinians’ professional and private spaces… The use of surveillance techniques must stop, perpetrators must be held accountable, and victims including Salah Hamouri must receive justice.”

The group further called on the global community and France to pressure the Tel Aviv regime to unconditionally and immediately release Hamouri from administrative detention and cancel the proceedings for his residency revocation.

The NSO Group has been facing several lawsuits worldwide over the illegal use of Pegasus malware to target political dissidents, activists and journalists.

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