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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.addameer.org/news/4564">addameer.org</a>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Spyware Surveillance of Palestinian Human Rights Defenders</h1>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">November 8, 2021<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><p>After
the Israeli designation of six of the leading Palestinian civil society
organizations; Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association,
Al-Haq Law in the Service of Man (Al-Haq), Bisan Center for Research and
Development, Defense for Children International-Palestine, the Union of
Agricultural Work Committees, and the Union of Palestinian Women's
Committees, as "terror organizations" in a latest bid to delegitimize
their image and isolate them from their partners and solidarity
networks, Front Line Defenders (FLD) reveals today that there has been a
systematic underground campaign of spyware surveillance aimed at
infiltrating Palestinian human rights defenders and lawyers' devices.
The penetrating and monitoring of the devices of human rights defenders
violates not only the privacy rights of human rights defenders and
lawyers but also the countless victims that have been in any sort of
communication with them. The six organizations strongly condemn the
arbitrary, oppressive, and distressing revelations of spyware
surveillance mass operation and call for a firm response, including
concrete actions from the international community.\</p>
<p><strong>Pegasus Spyware Surveillance of Palestinian Human Rights Defenders</strong></p>
<p>On 16 October 2021, Al-Haq contacted FLD on suspicion of the spyware
infection of the iPhone device of one of its staff members. FLD
technical investigation found that the device had been infected in July
2020 with Pegasus spyware marketed by the Israeli NSO Group. Further
forensic investigation-peer-reviewed by Citizen Lab and Amnesty
International's Security Lab - of 75 iPhone devices belonging to
Palestinian human rights defenders and employees of civil society
organizations revealed that at least five additional devices were also
tapped into. Amongst them, Ghassan Halaika, Jerusalem-based field
researcher at Al-Haq; Ubai Al-Aboudi, Executive Director at Bisan Center
for Research and Development; and Salah Hammouri, lawyer and human
rights defender.</p>
<p><em>"When Pegasus is installed on a person's phone, an attacker has
complete access to a phone's messages, emails, media, microphone,
camera, passwords, voice calls on messaging apps, location data, calls,
and contacts. The spyware also has the potential to activate the phone
camera and microphone and spy on an individual's calls and activities." </em>(FLD, 8 November 2021).</p>
<p>Joint investigation of FLD, Citizen Lab, and Amnesty International's
Security Lab confirmed with high confidence that the infection emanated
from Pegasus Spyware pertaining to the Israel-based Pegasus spyware,
which has been used as a mass surveillance tool to target and facilitate
systematic repression of human rights activists, lawyers, journalists,
and political figures, as disclosed by the global Pegasus Project that
analyzed more than 50,000 phone numbers in July 2021. After the scathing
revelations made by the Pegasus Project, the NSO Group ironically
alleged that the Pegasus spyware's use was limited to government
intelligence and law enforcement agencies for counter-terrorism and
crime-fighting purposes.</p>
<p>On 3 November, the US Department of Commerce announced the placement
of NSO Group on its "entity list," effectively banning the business,
noting that "these tools have also enabled foreign governments to
conduct translational repression [and that] such practices threaten the
rules-based international order." Notably, despite agreements with the
United States and France to not surveil their citizens, in the case of
Ubai Al-Aboudi, and Salah Hammouri, the company has breached these
agreements consecutively. Shrinking Our Space, Violating our Right to
Privacy On 19 October, the Israeli Minister of Defense designated six
organizations of the Palestinian civil society as "terror organizations"
under Israel's domestic Anti-Terrorism Law 5776-2016. Two weeks later,
on 3 November, the Israeli military commander in the West Bank issued
five separate military orders announcing the organizations as "unlawful"
under the Defence (Emergency) Regulations 1945, which Britain
had notably repealed shortly before the end of the Mandate and which
Israel has illegally resurrected to implement numerous persecutory acts
against the protected Palestinian population.</p>
<p>This announcement outlawing the vital work of the Palestinian
organizations places them at imminent risk of forcible closure and their
employees at risk of arbitrary arrests and detention. Further, it
represents an alarming effort to criminalize and undermine their efforts
in furthering the realization of Palestinian human rights and the
pursuit of accountability through international mechanisms by
discrediting their essential work, isolating them from the international
community, and eventually cutting their sources of funding. In
practice, the designations laid against the Palestinian organizations
empower Israel to shut down their offices, seize their assets, including
bank accounts, and arrest and detain their staff members.</p>
<p>The parallel timelines of the FLD investigation and the Israeli
designations are concerning. The Israeli Minister of Defense's
designations of the civil society organizations only days after the
initiation of this investigation may amount to an attempt at
preemptively withholding evidence of surveillance and covering up
surreptitious spyware actions.</p>
<p>The systematic surveillance of Palestinian human rights defenders
comes in addition to an already unacceptable endless list of coordinated
actions led by Israeli governmental bodies and their affiliates to
instigate and perform systematic and organized smear, intimidation, and
persecution campaigns against Palestinian civil society. Over the past
decades, such techniques have included defamation campaigns aimed at
labeling human rights defenders as "terrorists," incitement to racial
hatred and violence, hate speech, arbitrary arrests, torture and
ill-treatment, death threats, travel bans, residency revocations, and
deportations.</p>
<p>In February 2019, Al-Haq submitted a report on Israel's surveillance
industry to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of
the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression. Drawing on the
surveillance apparatus used in the apartheid wall and operated by Elbit
and the Mabat 2000 surveillance project in the Old City of Jerusalem,
the submission shed light on the interrelations between the Israeli
military and the Israeli private surveillance industry. It further
addressed the alarming use of Pegasus spyware to muffle human rights
defenders in various countries, including Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Mexico,
Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.</p>
<p><strong>Persecution of Human Rights Defenders, A Tenet of Israel's Apartheid</strong></p>
<p>To begin, Israel, as a State party to the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), has obligations under Article 19 to
protect everyone's rights to privacy, opinion, and expression and
everyone's right to hold opinions without interference and to seek,
receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of
frontiers and through any media of his choice. The right to freedom of
opinion and expression is also ensured under Article 19 of the Universal
Declaration on Human Rights and Article 5 of the International
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.</p>
<p>Further, Article 17(1) of the ICCPR provides that "[n]o one shall be
subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy,
family, home or correspondence." In terms of surveillance, the UN Human
Rights Committee has warned that "Attacks on a person because of the
exercise of his or her right to freedom of expression may not be
justified by Article 19 (3)" and has underscored the importance of
protecting "persons who engaged in the gathering and analysis of
information on the human rights situation and who published human
rights-related reports, including judges and lawyers" .2 Further, States
obligations to protect human rights defenders, amongst others, from
third party interference is provided for under Article 2 of the ICCPR,
which imposes an obligation on States to respect and to ensure to all
individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the
rights recognized in the Covenant. While Article II (c) of the Apartheid
Convention prohibits the crime of apartheid, "Any legislative measures
and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from
participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of
the country…, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or
groups basic human rights and freedoms, including…. the right to freedom
of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful
assembly and association".</p>
<p>Business companies do not operate in a human rights-free vacuum. The
UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights codify States' duties
to protect and corporate responsibility to respect human rights in the
course of corporate activities. In particular, business companies must
implement "policies and processes appropriate to their size and
circumstances, including (b) a human rights due diligence process to
identify, prevent, mitigate and account for how they address their
impacts on human rights," as per Principle 15. To that extent, according
to Principles 17 to 21, human rights due diligence requires that the
company carries out proper and regular human rights impact assessments,
reported, and integrated into the company's code of conduct. In
conflict-affected areas, this requirement for due diligence is
heightened. Israel, accordingly, has a responsibility to prevent
companies such as Pegasus domiciled under its jurisdiction from carrying
out grave violations of human rights law in its surveillance of
Palestinian human rights defenders in the occupied territory.</p>
<p><strong>#StandWithTheSix, before They, Become Hundreds</strong></p>
<p>It comes with great concern that two weeks after the sinister
designation of six Palestinian civil society organizations as "terrorist
organizations," at least six Palestinian human rights defenders are
found to have had their most fundamental freedoms infringed by
surveillance practices that have infiltrated all aspects of their
private and professional life and the lives of all the victims they
serve, in addition to endless communications with international and
national officials, journalists, lawyers, and colleagues. This latest
revelation shows, once again, the extent of Israel's failure to regulate
an egregious surveillance industry in its territory, allowing private
human rights-violating surveillance industry to operate with impunity.
Such impunity is a global human rights issue that requires a concerted
global response on behalf of the international community as a whole.</p>
<p>In light of the unprecedented gravity of Pegasus Spyware multilayered
intrusion into Palestinian human rights defenders' space and privacy,
the six organizations urge the international community to provide
immediate protection of all the identified victims of this Spyware
surveillance infiltration and the immediate cessation of any ongoing
spyware infiltration.</p>
<p>We further urge the international community to take immediate actions
to bring Israel, the home State for Pegasus Spyware, into compliance
with its obligations under international law, in particular:</p>
<p>● Require an immediate moratorium on the sale, transfer, and use of
all forms of surveillance technology, particularly NSO Group's Pegasus
spyware, until a full independent investigation of its operation within
Palestine is carried out by the UN, in order to identify the scope of
its surveillance activities carried out against Palestinian human rights
defenders, and their ties to the Israeli government;</p>
<p>● Require a full audit of Israeli companies manufacturing
surveillance equipment, and define their connections to the Israel
governmental bodies, as well as their involvement in human rights
violations in Palestine and globally; and</p>
<p>● Demand the designing and implementation of a strict regulatory
framework to prevent, mitigate and redress the human rights impacts of
the surveillance industry, and ensure their compliance and conformity
with international human rights law, especially with the principle of
human rights due diligence enshrined in the UN Guiding Principles on
Business and Human Rights.</p>
<p>The six organizations call on:</p>
<p>● The UN Human Rights Office to report on mass surveillance companies
operating with Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian
territory, and include them in the UN Database on Business Activities;</p>
<p>● All States to immediately freeze their business agreements on
weapons and surveillance equipment with Israel and demand that Israel
report on its ties to its surveillance industry;</p>
<p>● The Prosecutor's Office of the International Criminal Court to
include the surveillance of Palestinian human rights defenders into its
current investigation on the situation in the State of Palestine, as a
means of persecution of those defenders who oppose its apartheid regime;
and</p>
<p>● Human Rights Defenders and civil society members to take steps to
reveal and hold accountable any similar spyware operations worldwide.</p>
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