HUMAN RIGHTS GROUP SPIED ON BY UK GOVERNMENT AND NOW, THEY ARE TAKING IT TO COURT…
After
human rights groups challenged the government for its mass surveillance
infrastructure, they were themselves illegally spied on. Illegal state spying jeopardizes
all our freedoms, and must be stopped.
We’ve known that governments have been
spying on all of us since whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed the scale of
mass online surveillance in 2013. At the start of November, Liberty and an
international coalition of human rights campaigners challenged the programmes he uncovered in court. The Snowden documents revealed how UK government ministers allowed GCHQ to
collect and store a backup of every communication entering and leaving the UK
so they could trawl through them later. The Snowden documents showed us that
those in power have access to our innermost thoughts. They can pore over the
ideas we share, track our travel plans, listen in on our meetings, browse our
financial records, and quietly observe our conversations with friends, lawyers,
doctors, colleagues and loved ones. They can review which websites we visit,
which forums we join, what games we play online. They can monitor our location,
our movements and our interactions. At Liberty, and at human rights groups around the world, we saw this for the rights violation it is,
and the chilling effect on democratic freedoms that follow – so we took the UK
government to court. In December 2014, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal – the
secretive court that oversees our intelligence services – decided that what the Government had been doing was, in principle, lawful.
But two months later, the court issued a
second judgment. It ruled that the UK government’s access to US surveillance
had rights before the legal challenge – because the agencies’ internal
guidance for handling it had been kept secret. The government had been allowed
to make submissions about that guidance in closed court, without Liberty or the
other organizations present. Unsurprisingly, we disagreed with the secretive
court’s conclusion that safeguards shown to it in secret were an adequate
protection of our fundamental rights. And in June 2015, the Tribunal confirmed
that GCHQ had carried out unlawful surveillance on two of the organizations taking
the case alongside us: Amnesty International and the Legal Resources Centre. The
court didn’t rule out the possibility that the other organizations had been
monitored too. If they had, the Tribunal simply didn’t disclose it because it
didn’t consider it unlawful. These rulings were the first time this
closed-doors court had ever ruled against the security services in its 15-year
history. It was the first time it admitted publicly that the UK government had
used its surveillance powers to target political and human rights activists.
We are human rights campaigners. Our organizations exist to stand up for people and challenge the powerful. We regularly
communicate with activists in the UK and overseas, as well as journalists, whistle blowers, victims of state abuse, government officials and lawyers. Some
of our fellow claimants work in countries where basic rights and freedoms are
under sustained and violent attack. Without strict confidentiality and
protection of sources, their work is dangerously undermined and they and those
they communicate with are at risk. Industrial-scale state spying is a violation
of our fundamental human rights. It jeopardizes everything on which our freedom
stands – our privacy, our free press, our right to speak, think and associate
freely. No democratic state has ever deployed powers like this against its
citizens and remained a rights-respecting democracy. So we weren’t satisfied
with the 2014 ruling that mass surveillance is, for the most part, lawful – and
we took our case to the European Court of Human Rights. At the hearing earlier
this month, our barrister had the government’s lawyers on the back foot. We argued that the UK government should not be able to scoop up and access all of our
communications on a massive, international scale. We argued that, without
limits on government surveillance, free expression, democracy and the rule of
law are gravely threatened.
We argued that surveillance is only
acceptable when it’s based on suspicion of serious criminal activity, and that
independent judges should decide when to allow it – instead of the spy agencies
and Home Secretary themselves. Several of the judges posed questions, mostly to
the government. They wanted to know more about the lack of safeguards in place
for sensitive information like that handled by human rights organizations,
doctors, elected representatives and lawyers. The court wanted confirmation
that surveillance warrants are in fact issued on a rolling basis, with the Home
Secretary having signed just one single certificate to green-light the
collection of millions of people’s messages. And the judges wanted more
information on what safeguards existed to restrict the scope of these warrants.
The government did its best to answer these questions. But it’s not easy to
defend policies lifted from the pages of a dystopian novel. If we win this
battle, a vital blow will be struck against mass state surveillance that treats
us all as suspects first and citizens second.
We’ll be one step closer to
reclaiming our fundamental right to express ourselves and communicate without
fear – protecting our freedom and democracy for generations to come.
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