UK court rejects Bahrain immunity claim in spyware case

The United Kingdom’s Supreme Court ruled Monday that Bahrain can’t hide behind state immunity to block a lawsuit filed by two dissidents alleging the government infected their devices with spyware.

Saeed Shehabi and Moosa Mohammed allege Bahrain secretly installed FinSpy spyware on their laptops, likely in 2011. Government agents then spied on them as they worked with Bahraini political prisoners, journalists and torture victims, they allege.

The men now live in the U.K., where they filed a lawsuit contending that they are owed damages from Bahrain for the mental harm they suffered.

The alleged hacking by officials in Bahrain “allowed access to and exfiltration of information on the computers, interception of communications conducted using the computers and use of the computers’ microphones and cameras to surveil the respondents,” according to the court opinion. 

“This course of conduct, which involved monitoring the respondents’ activities on a wide-ranging basis and by highly intrusive means” met the bar for illegal harassment, the opinion said.

The men learned their devices had been infected with spyware around August 2014, according to the court’s opinion, which said they saw reports on WikiLeaks and from a Bahraini watchdog organization.

A spokesperson for Bahrain’s Global Communication Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The island kingdom situated near the western shore of the Persian Gulf has long asserted that the hacking claims are false.

Last year, Bahrain’s leaders appealed to the U.K. Supreme Court with its state immunity claim. The court rejected that argument in a 3-2 decision, which found that because the hack occurred in the U.K., state immunity does not apply.

FinSpy, also known as FinFisher, has been described by The Citizen Lab as a “sophisticated” spyware “sold exclusively to governments for intelligence and law enforcement purposes.” 

FinFisher declared insolvency in 2022 amid investigations into its business dealings.

Mohammed arrived in Britain as a refugee in 2006 after being arrested and tortured by Bahraini police, his attorneys have said. Shehabi, who has lived in the U.K. since 1973, is a longtime pro-democracy activist and journalist who has been a leader of the country’s opposition movement.

In 2023, Shehabi said that his “long and gruelling pursuit of justice” is an example of “the psychological torture that authoritarian regimes exercise transnationally.”