The Kingdom was charged in July 2021 for using the IT program designed by Israeli NSO society, which it denounced as “false and unfounded allegations”.
Le Monde with AFP
The investigation stops there. The Court of Paris has declared inadmissible the defamation prosecutions brought by Morocco against French NGOs and media that revealed or denounced the remedy by flap for pegasus espionage software, learned Le Monde, Friday, March 25th. Morocco’s lawyer expressed his intention to appeal.
The jurisdiction made ten judgments declaring the inadmissibility of direct quotes against [Nute], Radio France, France Media World, Mediapart, Humanity, Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International. Decisions rely on an article in the Law of 1881 on freedom of the press, which “does not allow a State, which can not be equated with an individual within the meaning of this text, to initiate a lawsuit in defamation “. The Kingdom’s lawyers argued that their request was admissible because it is not the state, but an administration – secret services – which attacks defamation.
Several judicial procedures in Europe
Morocco has been accused in July 2021 for using Pegasus, software designed by Israeli NSO society, as part of a vast survey conducted by a consortium of seventeen international media on the basis of database obtained by The organization forbidden stories and Amnesty International. Speaking of “false and unfounded allegations”, Morocco had initiated several judicial proceedings in France, Spain and Germany.
The Pegasus software allows, once installed in a mobile phone, to spy on the user from the device, by accessing his messaging, his data, or by the activation of the device remotely to Sound or visual capture purposes.
During the trial, lawyers of the organizations and the media had in turn requested the inadmissibility of this “gagging procedure”. “No less than six times” between 2018 and 2019, “The Court of Cassation has come to repeat, the first time in Azerbaijan and five times in Morocco, which returned to the charge, that it was not admissible to act In defamation “as a state,” said Simon Foreman for Amnesty International. “It’s an exclusively communication exercise,” he argued.
The lawyer of Morocco, Olivier Baratelli, had argued that this country had “the right to defend the honor terribly flouted by its intelligence services” by “irresponsible journalists”.