The European Parliament checks the mobile phones of MEPs to detect if they are punctured with Pegasus

The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in the European Parliament on February 16. FREDERICK FLORIN (AFP)

Brussels' concern about the spread of the Pegasus espionage program is growing by the minute.

The European Parliament has offered this Thursday a check of the mobile phones to the 705 MEPs that make up the plenary session.

The review program, which will be carried out by the European Parliament's computer services, is launched 24 hours after the MEP Carles Puigdemont, in the company of other Catalan independence leaders, denounced in Brussels the espionage to which 63 were subjected. politicians and activists linked to the

.

The review of MEPs' mobile terminals has been an initiative at the highest level, promoted by the president of the European Parliament, the popular Roberta Metsola, and by the secretary general of the institution, Klaus Welle.

The technicians of the European Parliament will subject the mobile phones of the MEPs who wish to do so to a half-hour scrutiny.

The technicians warn that depending on the result of that initial scan "it could be necessary with a detailed security analysis that would require more time."

Parliament also launched this Thursday an investigation commission on the use of Pegasus, a surveillance software developed by the Israeli company NSO and which, in principle, can only be acquired by government authorities.

The creation of this research forum had been decided before the so-called

broke out .

Liberal MEP Sophie in 't Veld, who will be the rapporteur for the commission of inquiry's report, regards the

"We have strong indications that journalists, activists and members of the democratic opposition are being targeted" by the program of espionage.

The MEP considers that the suspicion that some European governments could even be using this tool to spy on certain European commissioners only aggravates the situation.

Both the Polish and Hungarian governments are under fire for their alleged use of Pegasus.

And among the commissioners who could have been spied on is Justice, Didier Reynders, with whom Warsaw and Budapest are in a head-on clash over the Brussels investigations into the deterioration of the rule of law and fundamental freedoms in Poland and Hungary.

The parliamentary commission will be in charge of investigating for 12 months "the scope of the alleged infractions or cases of maladministration in the application of Union law that result from the use of the Pegasus surveillance spy program", according to the decision of March 10 who created the new forum.

The parliamentarians, according to the aforementioned decision, will try to “collect information on the extent to which Member States, including, among others, Hungary and Poland, or third countries resort to intrusive surveillance that violates the rights and freedoms recognized in the Charter [of the fundamental rights of the EU] and assess the risk this poses to the values ​​recognized in article 2 of the EU Treaty”.

The allusion to a possible violation of the Charter and article 2 lays the groundwork for a possible fraudulent use of Pegasus to be used as a cause or aggravating factor to apply article 7 of the Treaty, which allows suspending in such a case the right to vote of a partner in the Council of the EU.

Hungary and Poland are already subject to this type of file.

But the

scandal shows that the use of Pegasus could be more widespread in the EU than previously thought.

And the parliamentary investigation will probably also target Spain, especially when one of the 38 members of the commission is the Greens MEP Diana Riba.

Riba, who occupies the vice-presidency of the commission, is one of the 63 people who were spied on in Spain, according to the

report prepared by Citizen Lab, a group of cybersecurity experts from the Canadian University of Toronto.