\n
Britain\u2019s Supreme Court has dismissed a bid by Bahrain to claim state immunity to close down a spyware lawsuit filed by two dissidents.<\/p>\n
The ruling, handed down on Monday by a narrow 3-2 majority, sets a significant precedent, confirming that foreign states can be sued in UK courts over the remote surveillance of individuals in Britain, even when the hacking itself was directed from abroad.<\/p>\n
Saeed Shehabi, a journalist and founder of a Bahraini political party that opposes the Khalifa royal family\u2019s rule, and Moosa Mohammed, a Bahraini refugee, accused the Bahraini government of infecting their computers in 2011 with spyware known as FinSpy, capable of logging keystrokes, tracking locations and monitoring their activities remotely.<\/p>\n
Both men, who live in the UK, sued in London\u2019s High Court in 2020, seeking damages for \u201cpsychiatric harm\u201d.<\/p>\n
Bahrain denied the hacking and argued the alleged acts took place outside UK jurisdiction, entitling it to immunity.<\/p>\n
The High Court of Justice in London rejected that argument in 2023 in a decision upheld by the Court of Appeal the following year, prompting Bahrain\u2019s final appeal to the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n
In Monday\u2019s ruling, the court found that the alleged surveillance counted as an act carried out in the UK, claiming the claimants and their computers were located in Britain when the spyware allegedly took effect, opening the way for the case to proceed to trial.<\/p>\n
The judgement is part of a growing body of litigation testing whether states and surveillance firms can be held liable in Western courts for spyware deployed against critics abroad after similar cases, including WhatsApp\u2019s ongoing lawsuit in the United States against the NSO Group over Pegasus spyware.<\/p>\n
Rights groups have long accused Bahrain of surveilling dissidents and journalists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.aljazeera.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ruling establishes that countries using spyware on people in the UK can be sued. Published On 27 Jul 202627 Jul 2026 Britain\u2019s Supreme Court has dismissed a bid by Bahrain to claim state immunity to close down a spyware lawsuit filed by two dissidents. The ruling, handed down on Monday by a narrow 3-2 majority, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2520165,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[420839,362822,401927,26961,375243,359698,21738,353920,27727],"class_list":["post-2520164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-bahrain","tag-courts","tag-cybersecurity","tag-europe","tag-human-rights","tag-middle-east","tag-news","tag-privacy","tag-united-kingdom"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/UK-court-dismisses-Bahrains-bid-to-block-activists-spyware-lawsuit.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2520164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2520164"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2520164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2520166,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2520164\/revisions\/2520166"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2520165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2520164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2520164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2520164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}