What the case was about
The claimants, Dr Saeed Shehabi and Mr Moosa Mohammed, are pro-democracy activists and prominent critics of the Bahraini government who have lived in the UK for decades. They allege that from 2011, people acting for Bahrain infected their computers with spyware called FinSpy, giving access to their files, communications, camera and microphone. On the facts assumed for the appeal, the operators were working from outside the UK, running the spyware through a server based in Bahrain. The claimants say they only learned of the surveillance in 2014, after WikiLeaks and an organisation called Bahrain Watch published information about the program, and that discovering what had happened caused them psychiatric injury.