The Paris Court of Appeal confirmed on Wednesday the inadmissibility of defamation suits brought by Morocco against NGOs and French media, that claimed the Kingdom used the Israeli Pegasus spying software.
In the first instance, the criminal court of Paris had rendered ten judgments declaring the inadmissibility of direct summonses against Le Monde, Radio France, France Media Monde, Mediapart, L’Humanité, Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International.
The Court of Appeals upheld all ten rulings, according AFP.
“The decisions were based on an article of the French law of 1881 on freedom of the press, which ‘does not allow a state, which cannot be assimilated to a private individual within the meaning of this text, to bring a defamation suit’,” said the same source.
Morocco “is studying the advisability of an appeal in cassation to assert its right to act against the slanderous accusations made by some media outlets who have claimed, without any proof or prima facie evidence, that he would use the software Pegasus,” said Morocco’s lawyer Olivier Baratelli in a statement to AFP.
Morocco was accused in the summer of 2021 of having used Pegasus, a software designed by Israeli company NSO.
Morocco then initiated several legal proceedings in France, Spain and Germany, denouncing the “false and unfounded allegations.”
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