The director of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), Esperanza Casteleiro, confirmed this Monday in a Barcelona court that the Supreme Court authorized Spain's intelligence services to spy on former Catalan National Assembly (ANC) presidents Jordi Sánchez and Elisenda Paluzie. The Council of Ministers declassified some of the confidential documents related to this surveillance last week, allowing Casteleiro, who has headed the CNI since 2022, to explain to Barcelona's Court of Instruction Number 23 that Sánchez and Paluzie were spied on from 2019. Although Casteleiro alone, the Catalan police force, the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police), detected intrusions on Sánchez's mobile phone as early as 2015, when theoretically there was still no authorization to spy on him. The pro-independence leader was a Junts candidate for the Catalan Parliament in 2018 and for the Spanish Congress in 2019, and the party's general secretary between 2020 and 2022. Casteleiro has acted as he did a few months ago in the case of the spying on ERC deputies Josep Maria Jové and Diana Riba. That is, he has limited himself to corroborating only what the declassified portion of the Supreme Court's rulings allows us to know—that since 2019 the spying on Sánchez and Paluzie was judicially authorized—but without confirming the details or the methods of espionage. In an appearance before Congress in May 2022, the former director of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), Paz Esteban, had already admitted to having spied, with the Supreme Court's approval, on both Sánchez and Paluzie. Intrusions from four years prior

In May 2022, the ANC filed a lawsuit regarding the spying on its leaders, although it did not target any specific state official or agency. At that time, and based on a Citizen Lab report, it was established that those affected were Paluzie, with four attacks and one confirmed infection between 2019 and 2020; Sánchez, with 26 attacks between 2015 and 2017 and four confirmed infections; the national secretaries Sònia Urpí, with two SMS attacks in June 2020 and one confirmed infection, and Arià Bayé, with one SMS in 2020; and the grassroots member of the organization, Jordi Domingo, a victim via WhatsApp in 2019. Furthermore, a report by the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) confirms that Sà was also targeted. The first attack occurred in September 2015, when he had just been elected president of the ANC but an independence referendum had not yet been agreed upon. Most of the attacks occurred between then and October 2017, when he was imprisoned along with the president of Òmnium, Jordi Cuixart. In fact, the police assert that Sánchez's mobile phone was the victim of a malicious Pegasus attack and suffered data extraction between September and October 13, 2017, right at the height of the October 1 referendum and before he entered prison. All of these infections would fall outside the period for which there would have been judicial authorization, which Casteleiro has admitted today.

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