UK court says activist can pursue spyware case against Saudi Arabia 

On 11 October 2024, the UK’s High Court ruled that Saudi activist Yahya Assiri can continue his legal challenge against Saudi Arabia for being targeted with spyware while living in the UK. 

Yahya Assiri is a UK-based human rights defender and founder of the human rights organisation ALQST. A long-time friend of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was killed in October 2018 in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Assiri is known to be an outspoken critic of the Saudi Arabian government. 

In August 2018, Amnesty International’s Security Lab revealed how Yahya Assiri and an Amnesty International staff member had been targeted with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware

Our technologists confirmed the suspicious SMS and WhatsApp messages sent to Assiri, who was not named in the initial 2018 report, and an Amnesty researcher, were attempts to infect their phones with the highly invasive spyware. 

This isn’t about me; it’s about all of us. It’s for the heroes who languish in prisons, hoping for change. Our battle is to stop injustice, oppression and corruption,”  Assiri told Amnesty International in his response to the court decision. 

“Instead of the government understanding all this and moving towards genuine reforms for the human rights of all, it resorted to suppressing them, killing some of them and targeting us outside through these breaches to our devices that are intended to harm me and those who communicate with me.” 

According to Assiri’s lawyer Monika Sobiecki, this court order is a critical moment for his case since “the abuse of [Assiri’s] privacy rights now formally calls for an explanation from the State.” 

Indeed, the legal case itself is significant for the broader fight against transnational repression carried out using surveillance technology. 

Amnesty International and other civil society partners have long documented the devastating impacts of unlawful spyware use both on the individual victims and society at large, including the ‘chilling effect’ that it creates.  

Assiri has spoken about his fears for friends’ and fellow activists’ safety as a result of his phone being targeted:  

“I knowingly take the risk of being targeted for publicly working on human rights in Saudi Arabia; but it is unfair and causes me great anxiety that the people who I have been communicating with including the victims of rights abuses and their families in Saudi Arabia – are dragged into this, not knowing how the authorities might use information found on my device against them.” 

This news comes just weeks after Bahrain’s appeal to the UK for state immunity was dismissed in a spyware case involving UK-based dissidents. Both decisions send a strong message to authorities who use these technologies as tools for transnational repression with apparent impunity. They also send a message to players in the surveillance industry who continue to sell their wares to governments with appalling human rights records.  Around the world, there are people affected by spyware abuse who will not stop in their quest for justice and accountability.