when people close to former oligarch Lajos Simicska, his lawyer Csaba Nagy Ajtony was also among the targets<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe fact that lawyers have also become targets shows how widespread such operations are in Hungary. B\u00e1n\u00e1ti and other lawyers may have been targets even though the secrecy of communication with clients \u2013 commonly referred to as professional secrecy or the attorney\u2013client privilege \u2013 is one of the basic foundations of a lawyer’s work. It was not possible to conduct a subsequent forensic analysis on the phones of the targeted lawyers, so it is not known if their devices were actually hacked with Pegasus. In case they were, it was possible to monitor not only their phone calls, but all communication carried out through the devices.<\/p>\n
Although there is no clear evidence that lawyers were targeted with Pegasus for political reasons, representatives of the profession have had several conflicts with the government in recent years. Several lawyers objected to measures that they say undermined the independence of the judiciary, and also spoke out when the government attacked lawyers who are filing damages lawsuits against the state on behalf of convicts, labelling this process as \u201cprison business\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Hungarian government did not provide any substantive answers to a detailed set of questions on the use of Pegasus, including specific questions about the potential surveillance of lawyers. They told the international consortium of journalists that \u201cwe are not aware of the alleged data collection claimed by the request,\u201d adding that Hungary is \u201ca state governed by the rule of law, and thus always acts in accordance with the law in force, in case of all individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201eTotal control\u201d<\/h3>\n
Due to the legally fortified institution of the attorney\u2013client privilege, surveillance of lawyers may seem unusual. In fact, however, the rules of secret information gathering are so loose in Hungary that it is possible that lawyers become targets of surveillance in a legal way. Authorities \u2013 national security services, in particular \u2013 can monitor virtually anyone on a very large scale and with very little external control, even with intrusive spywares such as Pegasus.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is total control, it is up to the authorities to decide what the extent is of the protection of personal rights,\u201d Dr. L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Heged\u0171s, a lawyer and deputy president of the Budapest Bar Association, who previously dealt with the issue of surveillance of lawyers, told Direkt36.<\/p>\n
Depending on which authorities perform them, secret information-gathering operations basically have two categories. In the case of operations carried out by national security services, there is essentially no substantive external audit. They only need the permission of the Minister of Justice, but, in some cases. they can start secret information-gathering even before obtaining the permission.<\/p>\n
Slightly stricter rules apply when law enforcement authorities (police officers, tax investigators, etc.) conduct surveillance during the investigation of an alleged specific crime. They must obtain judicial permission to do so, and if the target is charged because of the surveillance, the data collected during the operation must be \u201copened up\u201d \u2013 that is, to be included in official investigative documents, which will be made available for the suspect.<\/p>\n
According to Heged\u0171s, the rules of criminal law state that lawyers may only subject of secret information-gathering if they are specifically suspected of a criminal offense. The lawyer will only be informed if he or she is specifically suspected of a crime, and the information gathered through surveillance or other secret methods become part of the investigation files. Thus, if a lawyer does not get charged in a case, he or she will never know if authorities had access to confidential information, including communication with clients.<\/p>\n
However, according to a former senior counterintelligence officer, anyone can become the subject of surveillance during a national security operation regardless of occupation. \u201cIn such cases, the fact that someone is a lawyer is not relevant. But a lawyer can be surveilled even if he is not the primary target, but let’s say only a closely related to the target,\u201d said the former officer. He also added that lawyers can also be used as informants without any problems, and secret information gathering is used at the beginning of the recruitment, during the so-called \u201capproach\u201d phase.<\/p>\n
In the case of the secret services, special legal experts ensure that requests for surveillance are sent to the minister or justice of to the with a justification that will not be refused. \u201cOur lawyer\u2019s job is to find a way how we can do something, not how we cannot,\u201d said another former high-ranking secret servant who has been involved in several surveillance requests, none of which was refused.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIn practice, there are \u201csignature days\u201d every week when surveillance requests in sealed envelopes are collected and handed over in person to the minister \u2013 currently Judit Varga, Minister of Justice \u2013 or to the judge with whom the leaders of the secret service establish a regular personal working relationship. \u201cIt’s just a formality. In fact, if you’ve known each other for a long time, sometimes you don’t even have to go there in person. Their job is simply to believe me and sign the request,\u201d the former officer said.<\/p>\n
Targeting before the small-town election<\/h3>\n
Direkt36 spoke to three lawyers who were targeted with Pegasus. None of them became suspects in any criminal case, and if their phones were infiltrated, they were never notified about it. Therefore, it is not clear why they could have been targeted.<\/p>\n
B\u00e1n\u00e1ti became a target at the end of 2018, when there was an ongoing investigation against one of his best-known clients at the time, Tam\u00e1s Gy\u00e1rf\u00e1s, in connection with the 1998 murder of media entrepreneur J\u00e1nos Feny\u0151. Gy\u00e1rf\u00e1s was the suspected instigator of the murder.<\/p>\n
During this period, B\u00e1n\u00e1ti was approached directly by the authorities investigating the case. The investigation revealed that Gy\u00e1rf\u00e1s had been blackmailed with a recording related to the Feny\u0151 case, and messages concerning the blackmail were sent to B\u00e1n\u00e1ti. Neither B\u00e1n\u00e1ti nor his client notified the authorities about the extortion. Yet the police eventually found out about it, questioned B\u00e1n\u00e1ti, who in response shared the extortion letters with the police.<\/p>\n
B\u00e1n\u00e1ti refused to comment on the complicated Gy\u00e1rf\u00e1s case and this particular episode, citing legal secret rules. However, he said he always communicates discreetly to defend his clients\u2019 interests. \u201cI have never spoken about legal secrets on the phone, and I have also encouraged my clients to do the same. But honestly, mainly because I have always presumed that their phone could be tapped, not mine,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The other targeted lawyers are less well-known. None of them is public figures, so in their cases, it is even less clear why they could have been targeted with the Pegasus software.<\/p>\n
One of the lawyers possibly targeted was baffled when we approached them, and, as they told Direkt36, they do not have any prominent clients or ones involved in politics and they have never sued the state, instead, mainly deals with insurance and compensation cases. However, the lawyer, who wished to remain unnamed in this article, told us about their previous political ambitions. Back in 2019, the time they were targeted, they considered running at a small-town mayoral election against a candidate of Fidesz. In the end, however, they abandoned their political aspiration for the time being.<\/p>\n
Another lawyer, who was contacted by Direkt36, was not surprised at all. The lawyer, wishing to remain anonymous, works in the special legal area of suing Hungarian state institutions for compensation on behalf of his clients, and suspects political reasons behind their possible tapping.<\/p>\n
They said that since 2017, they have experienced signs of their phone being tapped. Similarly to the stories of others, the lawyer talked about strange telephone conversations where they heard the conversation suddenly stopping and being replayed from the beginning. “I don’t want to put the crosshairs on myself even more. As they say, fear is governing us,” the lawyer explained why they wished not to disclose their name.<\/p>\n
Panic among lawyers<\/h3>\n
This is not the first time that the issue of routine secret surveillance of lawyers has come up. In 2015, the Budapest Bar Association even launched an inquiry into how serious this problem is. The inquiry was prompted by a police investigation involving a former police general named Ern\u0151 Kiss as the suspect. It turned out that during this investigation, Kiss\u2019s lawyer\u2019s mobile phone and office was tapped.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre whole law firms under secret surveillance? The Big Brother is watching, the Little Brother is looking back…\u201d- an article about the case was published on the front page of the Bar\u2019s newspaper, the Pesti \u00dcgyv\u00e9d, in July 2015. According to the article, at a board meeting of the Bar, a member said that the wiretapping in the Ern\u0151 Kiss investigation was not an isolated case. The unnamed lawyer also said that according to \u201cunofficial but reliable\u201d information, certain law firms are tapped \u201cin full\u201d by state actors.<\/p>\n
A committee set up by the Bar eventually concluded that the authority’s proceedings in the Ern\u0151 Kiss case were lawful. “It is not against the law to wiretap a law firm, especially in such a serious case,\u201d said Dr. L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Heged\u0171s, deputy chairman of the Bar, who chaired the ad hoc committee. By calling the case serious, he meant that Kiss was accused of bribery. He was suspected to demand one billion HUF from Istv\u00e1n Kocsis, a former state company leader, to help smooth the ongoing investigations against him, and the money transfer allegedly happened in the presence of Kiss’s lawyer. (Kiss, who was convicted in 2015, died of a heart attack a year later.)<\/p>\n
Heged\u0171s said he was approached by about ten other lawyers at the time, who had suspected their surveillance, but in none of those cases could they prove that it had happened. Nevertheless, he thinks that these suspicions can still be true. In the cases of secret surveillance, \u201crules are quite permissive and even these are not necessarily respected.\u201d \u201cWe can\u2019t even find out about it,\u201d he added, because if a lawyer is placed under covert surveillance but does not eventually become a suspect, they will never be aware of the surveillance.<\/p>\n
The replayed phone call<\/h3>\n
Another lawyer, Dr. Tivadar H\u00fcttl, learned by his own example how difficult it is to nail down details of potential surveillance cases.<\/p>\n
Like the story of one of the lawyers requesting anonymity, it also started with a replayed phone call. H\u00fcttl, who works for a human rights NGO called Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (TASZ), received a phone call in September 2015 from opposition politician Benedek J\u00e1vor, then a member of the European Parliament, but the line was broken up after a minute. J\u00e1vor later reported in a Facebook post that after the line broke up, he heard on the phone their conversation being replayed from the beginning. J\u00e1vor suspected that this was a sign of their phone being tapped.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nH\u00fcttl contacted the ministers overseeing the Hungarian secret services, but received no convincing answers.\u00a0 <\/span>Both the Ministry of the Interior (overseeing the internal secret services) and the Pime Minister\u2019s Office (then overseeing foreign intelligence services) told him that no \u201cillegal surveillance\u201d was carried out against him. The Ministry of Defense, overseeing the secret services of the military, claimed that they did not collect secret intelligence about H\u00fcttl.<\/p>\nThe lawyer then turned to the Hungarian parliamentary committee on national security, which is responsible for overseeing all secret services, including investigating complaints about the activities of the services. However, a majority of committee members decided not to open an investigation into the matter. The decision was made in a closed session, so it is unknown who voted against it, but opposition members have long complained that the pro-government majority frequently obstructs the investigation of sensitive matters.<\/p>\n
H\u00fcttl therefore appealed to the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights, where his case is ongoing. In his briefing, the lawyer wrote: \u201cSince what has happened, I try to talk about delicate matters with my clients in person. The fact that there is a real possibility of secret surveillance makes my daily work difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cover picture: Janos Muranyi<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Professional secrecy does not seem to protect lawyers from becoming targets of surveillance. B\u00e1n\u00e1ti was targeted during a famous murder case, while another lawyer became the target at the time when he wanted to run against the Fidesz mayor of a small town during the last municipal elections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":7133,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[445],"class_list":["post-7132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-megfigyelesek","author-panyi-szabolcs"],"authors":[{"term_id":445,"user_id":8,"is_guest":0,"slug":"panyi-szabolcs","display_name":"Szabolcs Panyi","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/av_Panyi_Szabolcs.png","url2x":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/av_Panyi_Szabolcs.png"},"description":"[:hu]Az ELTE magyar nyelv \u00e9s irodalom szak\u00e1n diplom\u00e1zott. 2013 \u00e9s 2018 k\u00f6z\u00f6tt az Index.hu politika rovat\u00e1nak volt szerkeszt\u0151je \u00e9s \u00fajs\u00e1g\u00edr\u00f3ja. 2017-18-ban Fulbright-\u00f6szt\u00f6nd\u00edjjal az Arizona State University-n tanult oknyomoz\u00f3 \u00fajs\u00e1g\u00edr\u00e1st. 2018 \u0151sz\u00e9n csatlakozott a Direkt36-hoz, ahol f\u0151k\u00e9nt nemzetbiztons\u00e1gi \u00e9s k\u00fclpolitikai vonatkoz\u00e1s\u00fa t\u00f6rt\u00e9neteken dolgozik. Mellette a vars\u00f3i k\u00f6zpont\u00fa VSquare.org visegr\u00e1di r\u00e9gi\u00f3s t\u00e9nyfelt\u00e1r\u00f3 \u00fajs\u00e1g\u00edr\u00f3i platform egyik alap\u00edt\u00f3ja, 2023-t\u00f3l a k\u00f6z\u00e9p-eur\u00f3pai oknyomoz\u00e1sok vezet\u0151je. N\u00e9gyszer nyert Min\u0151s\u00e9gi \u00fajs\u00e1g\u00edr\u00e1s\u00e9rt d\u00edjat \u00e9s szint\u00e9n n\u00e9gyszer Transparency-Soma-d\u00edjat, 2018-ban \u00e9s 2021-ben pedig az Eur\u00f3pai Sajt\u00f3 D\u00edj d\u00f6nt\u0151se volt.\r\n[:en]Szabolcs graduated from E\u00f6tv\u00f6s Lor\u00e1nd University where he studied Hungarian language and literature. Between 2013 and 2018, he was an editor and political reporter at Index.hu. At Arizona State University, he studied investigative journalism on a Fulbright Fellowship in 2017-2018. In the fall of 2018, he joined Direkt36, where he mainly works on stories related to national security and foreign policy. Meanwhile, he helped launch VSquare.org, a Warsaw-based cross-border investigative journalism initiative for the Visegr\u00e1d region, where he is currently leading the Central Eastern European investigations. He received the Quality Journalism Award and the Transparency-Soma Award four times each, and he was also shortlisted for the European Press Prize in 2018 and 2021.[:]","first_name":"Szabolcs","last_name":"Panyi","user_url":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7132"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9382,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132\/revisions\/9382"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7132"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/direkt36.exot.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=7132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}