Pegasus Is A Malware Which Is Per se Illegal, The Fact That Govt. Have Not Denied it Means They Used It: Kapil Sibal Tells Supreme Court

In the Pegasus issue, the petitioners on Monday did not take kindly to the Centre telling the Supreme Court that it has nothing more to say than what has been said in its first and only affidavit - that it does not deem it appropriate to state whether any particular software was employed or not, that there has been no illegal interception, and that it. Now we will consider what are the interim orders that we will have to pass" Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal, for N. Ram, former Editor of The Hindu, and Sashi Kumar, Chairperson of the Asian College of Journalism Beginning, Mr. Sibal indicated the observations of the Supreme Court in the 2011 case of Ram Jethmalani v. UOI, where the court had noted that the burden of protection of fundamental rights is primarily the duty of the State, and hence, withholding of information from the petitioners, or seeking to cast the relevant events and facts in a light favourable to the State in the context of judicial proceedings, would be destructive to the guarantee in Article 32, and the State has the duty to reveal all the facts and information in its possession to the Court, and also provide the same to the petitioners. Mr. Sibal read out the 2019 response of Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad in the Parliament on the question of interception of mobile phone data- "Government has taken note of the fact that a spyware/malware has affected some Whatsapp users. Senior Advocate Rakesh Dwivedi for S. N. M. Abdi, a journalist whose name was in the potential list of Pegasus targets "If the government does not file any further affidavit, the assumption would follow that what we have stated in our affidavits, based on prima facie analysis finding that our phones carry traces of Pegasus, is correct and there should be a presumption at least that we have been spied on. "I pray that, particularly in the present facts where the government has totally refused to file an affidavit, there must be a constitution of an SIT which may be headed by a retired judge of the Supreme Court so that the court can supervise and there would be some credibility to whatever investigation is carried out", Ms. Arora added.