Bahrain Lost Its State Immunity Claim in London, and the FinSpy Case Can Now Be Heard

The UK Supreme Court on 27 July dismissed an appeal by Bahrain, which had claimed state immunity against a long-running lawsuit brought by two political activists, Saeed Shehabi and Moosa Mohammed, over psychological harm suffered after their laptops were infected with FinSpy spyware while they were in the United Kingdom. The claimants believe the operation was authorised and directed by the Bahraini government. One caveat belongs in the copy rather than the footnotes: the account here is Amnesty International’s release of the same day, and this desk has not retrieved the judgment itself or its neutral citation. Amnesty responded through Stanley Kwenda, its Strategic Communications Advisor. Nothing in the ruling establishes who operated the spyware; it establishes that a foreign state cannot use immunity to keep the question out of an English courtroom.

The other pole of the spyware file this month produced confirmation without consequence. Citizen Lab found that the device of Stelios Kouloglou, the Greek investigative journalist and former MEP, had been targeted with Pegasus while he sat on the European Parliament committee investigating abuses of that same tool, as Al Jazeera and TechCrunch reported in early July. Amnesty called the European response inaction. A month on, no Greek or Commission measure has been reported. The contrast is the point: technical attribution of a spyware infection is now routine and carries no cost, while the slower jurisdictional route — proving a state can be sued where the harm landed — is where the pressure is accumulating.

Assessment: Courts and intelligence agencies are converging on the same subject from opposite ends, and the standards do not travel. A London bench can now hear whether Bahrain directed an infection; an American agency will not say in public what its analysts have already written down about Minnesota. Litigation forces disclosure of forensic method, which is precisely what governments protect and what vendors monetise. Watch for two second-order effects: whether other FinSpy and Pegasus claimants with UK residence file on the back of this ruling, and whether Gulf states with British legal exposure change how surveillance contracts are structured rather than how they are used. Manama has not said what it will do next.