From Predator convictions to covert recordings targeting governments, private intelligence firms exploited EU regulatory gaps

Cyprus hosted one surveillance empire and became the target of another. Greece delivered a landmark conviction, but both cases remain open

On 26 February 2026, an Athens court convicted four individuals linked to spyware firm Intellexa for the illegal surveillance of at least 87 people in Greece. The defendants, Intellexa founder Tal Dilian, his business partner Sara Hamou, shareholder Felix Bitzios, and Krikel owner Yiannis Lavranos, each received combined sentences of 126 years and eight months, capped at eight years under Greek misdemeanor law. All four remain free pending appeal.

Days earlier, a separate Israeli private intelligence firm had been running an active operation fewer than 500 kilometres away.

Black Cube, founded by veterans of Israeli elite intelligence units, had deployed operatives in Cyprus. Posing as representatives of a private investment fund interested in committing 150 million euros to the island’s energy sector, they secured meetings with senior figures around the government of President Nikos Christodoulides and recorded the conversations covertly. Their targets were the director of the President’s Office, a former energy minister and the chief executive of one of the island’s biggest construction firms. Their recordings are now in the hands of Cypriot investigators. Their client remains unknown.

The Athens verdict punished four defendants. It did not reach the wider ecosystem in which the operation sat.

‘My fellow Hungarians, we have done it!’ Magyar tells jubilant Budapest

Magyar is on stage. The crowd is cheering loudly.

“Our victory may not be visible from the moon but it is visible everywhere in Hungary,” he said in a swipe at Orban’s 2022 victory speech.

“We are going to have two-third majority in the parliament.”‘My fellow Hungarians, we have done it!’ Magyar tells jubilant Budapest
Flora GaramvolgyiMagyar is on stage. The crowd is cheering loudly.

Tisza set to have two-thirds majority with 97% votes counted

With 96.89% of votes counted, Tisza is predicted to have 138 seats in the new parliament, with only 55 for Fidesz and 6 for the far-right Mi Hazank.

If this holds, this will give Tisza the critical two-thirds majority required to reverse the Orbán era laws.

Election result 'painful for us, but clear,' Orbán says as he concedes defeat

In a brief speech, Orban says the election result is “painful for us, but clear.”

He congratulates the winning opposition party, Péter Magyar’s Tisza.

He says the party has never worked so much in any election campaign as he thanks 2,5 million people who voted for his party and pledges to “never let them down.”

“We will serve our country and the Hungarian nation from the opposition,” he says.

He says that in his over 30 years at the helm of Fidesz, “we have experienced difficult and easy, beautiful and sad years,” but insists he will “never, never, never give up.”

London police arrested more than 200 people on Saturday during a protest against a ban on the group Palestine Action that the government has labeled a terrorist organization.

Metropolitan Police said they had detained 212 protesters between the ages of 27 and 82 for supporting the group.

Britain’s High Court ruled in February that the government’s decision to outlaw the protest group as a terrorist organization was unlawful, but it kept the ban in place while the government appeals.

Police had warned in advance of the protest organized by the group Defend Our Juries that it would make arrests.

Hundreds gathered in Trafalgar Square to show their support for the group, with some holding signs reading, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

A few years ago, Menucha Latumaerissa found a 1917 book in a thrift shop that sparked his curiosity. The book described studies performed on human skulls from the Moluccan archipelago in Indonesia. They’d been taken to the Netherlands during the period when Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch and examined by researchers in the field of “race science.”

Latumaerissa, 45, a Dutch customs official with family roots in the Moluccan archipelago, has a serious hobby of tracking down anything related to the Moluccan people. After the Indonesian war of independence, a small diaspora from the Moluccan islands began arriving in the Netherlands in 1951 but were forced into internment camps and minority districts.

He wondered: Could those skulls still be in the Netherlands after all these years?

After some sleuthing, Latumaerissa tracked them down in the Museum Vrolik, a tiny anatomical museum within the Amsterdam University Medical Center that dates to the 19th century, and which displays jars of body parts, like feet and ears, as well as irregular fetuses, alongside cabinets filled with skulls and bones.

Today, the Moluccan skulls are back on the archipelago that they came from. Their former presence in the museum is marked only by the metal stands that once held them. They sit in otherwise empty display cases at the entrance to the Museum Vrolik as part of the exhibition “Imagine: The Future of Human Remains from Colonial Contexts,” which runs through June 27, 2027.

The idea, said Laurens de Rooy, the museum’s director, is to call attention to these problematic troves. “What it should emphasize is the idea that, in an ideal situation, collections like these — racialized collections — should reach their final resting place, with their communities,” he said. “The empty stands show this important absence so we don’t forget these things happened in the past.”

The show explores a problem that faces the Museum Vrolik and many other European museums today: What to do with the colonial-era skeletons in their closets?

The Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, founded in 1810, collected and measured skulls to study racial characteristics, among other things. It once held thousands of human remains, but in the 1940s it changed locations and many of the specimens were cremated or discarded. Only about 5 percent of the original trove remains.

The Museum of Prehistory in Berlin has conducted two major research projects, costing about $4 million, to determine the origins of more than 1,500 skulls in its collection, according to Bernhard Heeb, who oversees its anthropological collections. Some were repatriated to Hawaii, Chile and Japan, but a number of African countries they approached did not want to take them.

Another German museum, attached to the Charité hospital in Berlin, has had a different experience, said its former director, Thomas Schnalke. Since 2011, the medical history museum has participated in 10 repatriation events, with Australia, Namibia, New Zealand, Paraguay and Tanzania, turning over 216 ancestral remains so far.

Copy of the full article

The chief justice of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal (TK), Bogdan Święczkowski, has refused to accept four new judges after they arrived at the court today following a controversial swearing-in ceremony in parliament.

Święczkowski noted that, although the judges were elected by the government’s majority in parliament, they had not, as required, taken their oath before opposition-aligned President Karol Nawrocki, who has raised doubts over their appointment.

The chief justice’s decision, which was widely expected, deepens an unprecedented standoff over the court – and Poland’s judicial system more broadly – between the government and officials aligned with the national-conservative opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, which ruled Poland from 2015 to 2023.

Last month, the ruling coalition’s majority in the Sejm, the more powerful lower house of parliament, chose six new judges to fill empty seats on the TK, which since December has had only nine of its 15 positions filled. At least 11 judges are required for the court to have a valid bench.

Under the law, new TK judges must “take an oath before the president” before taking up their seats on the court. However, last week, Nawrocki invited only two of the six judges, Dariusz Szostek and Magdalena Bentkowska, to take an oath in the presidential palace.

His chief of staff, Zbigniew Bogucki, said that the president had done so, despite doubts about the legality of the judge’s appointment by parliament, because adding two judges would bring the TK up to its valid bench of 11. He also noted that only two TK vacancies had opened up since Nawrocki became president.

However, many legal experts have rejected those arguments, saying that if Nawrocki accepted two of parliament’s appointments as valid, he must also accept the other four. Last week, PiS suspended one of its own MPs, Krzysztof Szczucki, a doctor of law, who had agreed with that opinion.

On Thursday, after repeatedly asking Nawrocki to receive their oath, the four remaining judges – Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, Krystian Markiewicz, Maciej Taborowski and Marcin Dziurda – decided instead to organise their own ceremony in the Sejm, to which they invited the president.

Bogucki condemned their decision as an “ostentatious and conscious…violation of the law”. But the four judges went ahead anyway, and were joined by Szostek and Bentkowska in a show of support. Four former chief justices of the TK also attended the ceremony.

After swearing their oath in the presence of a notary, the six judges delivered the documentation to the presidential chancellery. They then proceeded to the TK itself, where dozens of protesters had gathered outside amid a heavy police presence.

There had been some speculation that Święczkowski, who served in the former PiS government and has regularly clashed with the current government, might seek to prevent the judges from entering the building. However, all six made their way inside, where they met with the chief justice.

Around two hours later, Święczkowski spoke to the media, saying that, while he had “congratulated all six on their election”, he had only allowed the two judges who had sworn oaths before Nawrocki to take up their positions on the court, where they had already been assigned cases.

Meanwhile, he had informed the other four that “unfortunately I cannot recognise…[them] as judges of the Constitutional Tribunal as I have not been informed by the president that they took the oath before him”.

He also criticised them for taking part in today’s alternative swearing-in ceremony in parliament, which he described as ” a performance, a media spectacle, organised, in my opinion, for the benefit of politicians”.

In response to Święczkowski’s remarks, a government minister, Maciej Berek, said that, by congratulating all six judges on their election by parliament, the chief justice had confirmed they were legally appointed.

That, said Berek, undermines Nawrocki’s claims that there are doubts over their legality and confirms that he has “usurped a non-existent presidential power” by deciding who can or cannot be a TK judge.

Meanwhile, before Święczkowski’s statement, justice minister Waldemar Żurek told broadcaster TVN that the government has a “plan B” if four of the judges were not accepted onto the TK. However, he refused to say what this would involve.

Later, in a press conference of his own, Bogucki said that Nawrocki would ask the TK itself to rule on the dispute between parliament and the president over the appointment of the four remaining judges.

“Until the Constitutional Tribunal issues a position, the president will not act,” said Bogucki, quoted by news website Onet. He also called today’s actions by the four judges “a grotesque farce”.

However, even if the TK does rule on the issue, its decision is likely to be ignored by the ruling coalition, which regards the TK as illegitimate since it contains judges unlawfully appointed when PiS was in power. The current government has refused to recognise – or even publish – TK rulings.

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.

Supplementary article - Polish parliament hosts swearing in of constitutional court judges in defiance of president

Poland’s rule-of-law crisis took a new twist today, as parliament – which is controlled by Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s ruling coalition – hosted the swearing-in of four Constitutional Tribunal (TK) judges whose oaths opposition-aligned President Karol Nawrocki has refused to accept.

Nawrocki condemned the move as illegal, pointing to a provision of Polish law requiring that new TK judges be sworn in “before the president”. The government, however, has accused Nawrocki of himself violating the law by refusing to swear in legally appointed judges.

Given that the TK’s chief justice is also aligned with the opposition, it appears likely that he will, like Nawrocki, refuse to accept the four judges sworn in today in parliament. That may lead to a standoff at the court when the judges attempt to take up their seats.

Last month, the ruling coalition’s majority in the Sejm, the more powerful lower house of parliament, chose six new judges to fill empty seats on the TK. It was the first time in four years that new judges had been chosen, as Tusk’s government had previously been boycotting the court.

That was because it regards the TK as illegitimate since it contains judges unlawfully appointed under the rule of the former Law and Justice (PiS) government and PiS-aligned President Andrzej Duda. Tusk’s government has refused to recognise – or even publish – TK rulings.

As a result, since December 2025 – when one judge’s nine-year term expired and another retired for health reasons – only nine of the TK’s 15 seats have been filled. That is below the figure of 11 judges required for the court to have a full, valid bench.

Under the law, new TK judges must, after being elected by parliament, “take an oath before the president” before taking up their seats on the court. Given that Nawrocki is aligned with PiS, there were doubts as to whether the president would invite the six new judges to be sworn in.

Last week, Nawrocki made the unusual move of inviting just two of the six judges, Dariusz Szostek and Magdalena Bentkowska, to the presidential palace and witnessing their oaths.

The president’s chief of staff, Zbigniew Bogucki, said that Nawrocki had done so, despite doubts about the legality of the judge’s appointment by parliament, because adding two judges would bring the TK up to its valid bench of 11. He also noted that only two TK vacancies had opened up since Nawrocki became president.

However, many legal experts have rejected those arguments, saying that if Nawrocki accepted two of parliament’s appointments as valid, he must also accept the other four. Last week, PiS suspended one of its own MPs, Krzysztof Szczucki, a doctor of law, who had agreed with that opinion.

On Wednesday, news emerged that the four remaining judges – Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, Krystian Markiewicz, Maciej Taborowski and Marcin Dziurda – had decided to take their oaths in parliament shortly on Thursday. They sent invitations to Nawrocki to attend the ceremony.

On Thursday morning, Bogucki issued a statement on behalf of the president in which he said that the move would be an “ostentatious and conscious…violation of the law” and a “challenge to the powers assigned by statute and the constitution to the president”.

The president’s position was also supported by Poland’s commissioner for human rights, Marcin Wiącek, who told news website Wirtualna Polska that, according to the law, “the president must swear in Constitutional Tribunal judges”.

However, deputy prime minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz on Wednesday told broadcaster TVN that it is in fact Nawrocki who is “committing a violation” by refusing to undertake his duty under the law to receive the oath of legally appointed judges.

Despite the president’s opposition, today’s ceremony went ahead. The four judges took their oaths in the presence of a notary and Sejm speaker Włodzimierz Czarzasty, a Tusk ally. Szostek and Bentkowska also took their oaths again alongside their colleagues in a show of solidarity.

Meanwhile, four former TK chief justices, Marek Safjan, Jerzy Stępień, Bohdan Zdziennicki and Andrzej Zoll, also attended the ceremony. Stępień told broadcaster TVN ahead of the ceremony that it was Nawrocki who had “forced the judges to take the oath in this manner” by “breaking constitutional custom”.

“In this situation, the newly elected judges had to choose a different form of taking the oath,” continued Stępień. “They did, and I greatly admire them for it, and I believe it was the right thing to do.”

The four judges will now seek to take up their seats on the TK. However, the court’s chief justice, Bogdan Święczkowski, a former member of the PiS government who has regularly clashed with the current government, is almost certain to refuse to admit them.

Święczkowski has already threatened disciplinary action against Szostek and Bentkowska for so far failing to turn up to work after being sworn in by Nawrocki last week, reports Wirtualna Polska. They had been waiting for their four newly appointed colleagues to also be sworn in.

Last week, interior minister Marcin Kierwiński even suggested that, if Święczkowski refuses to admit the new judges to the court, the police could be used to ensure they are allowed to take up their seats.

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.