JUDGES have ruled that the system of spying used by the British state does not breach the European Convention of Human Rights.
The case claiming GCHQ’s spying techniques constituted a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights was brought by Amnesty, Privacy International and others.
Whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed the techniques of the UK’s spy headquarters (GCHQ) and the US spying centre, the National Security Agency (NSA).
Snowden leaked over a million documents revealing numerous global surveillance programmes for listening in on phone calls, intercepting e-mails, and reading people’s text messages.
This included a programme called ‘Tempora’ which enabled the state to watch people through their own webcams, to read their emails and scoop up web browsing histories.
The European Convention on Human Rights guarantees a right to privacy (article 8) and a right to the freedom of expression (Article 10), the case argued that both of these had been breached by GCHQ’s spying.
But the judges at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ruled otherwise.
In a written judgment, a panel of IPT judges said: ‘We have been able to satisfy ourselves that as of today there is no contravention of articles 8 and 10 by reference to those systems.’
James Welch, legal director for civil rights organisation Liberty, said: ‘So a secretive court thinks that secret safeguards shown to it in secret are an adequate protection of our privacy.
‘The IPT cannot grasp why so many of us are deeply troubled about GCHQ’s Tempora operation – a seemingly unfettered power to rifle through our online communications.’
Amnesty UK’s legal advisor Rachel Logan said the government had ‘managed to bluff their way out of the case’ by ‘retreating into closed hearings and constantly playing the “national security” card.
‘We have had to painstakingly drag out every detail we could from an aggressively resistant government.’
She added, ‘The government’s entire defence has amounted to “trust us” and now the tribunal has said the same.’
