British spying services violate human rights, court rules

This Associated Press video says about itself:

(13 September 2018) The campaign group Big Brother Watch hailed the “landmark judgement” on Thursday after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British government’s mass-surveillance system breaches human rights.

The court said there was insufficient oversight of the way the government handles bulk interception of phone records and other surveillance data.

Big Brother Watch has been fighting the case for five years, against the backdrop of revelations by the American whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, said it was now time for the government to reform the system.

Another 13 September 2018 video used to say about itself:

UK mass surveillance regime violates human rights, declares landmark court ruling

The UK government’s mass surveillance regime violates human rights, Europe’s highest court ruled today. In a landmark 5-2 vote, the European Court of Human Rights declared there is “insufficient oversight” and “inadequate safeguards” over the government’s ‘bulk interception’ of its own citizens’ phone records.

It also found 6-1 that the UK’s regime for obtaining communications data from service providers “was not in accordance with the law”. And judges ruled there were “insufficient safeguards” for journalistic material in the UK government’s policy.

Today’s challenge, led by the campaign group Big Brother Watch, came in the wake of revelations about surveillance tactics by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Judges found aspects of the UK policy breached two articles of the European Convention on Human Rights – Article 8 (the right to private life) and Article 10 (free expression).

Not every aspect of the challenge was successful. Judges said the operation of a bulk interception regime would not in itself breach the Convention. And there was no breach in the UK’s regime for sharing intelligence with foreign governments, judges said.

The European Court of Human Rights is separate to the EU and has more member states. The Convention was written into British law two decades ago by the last Labour government in the Human Rights act.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

British intelligence service work violated human rights

The powers of the British intelligence services went too far and were in conflict with human rights. That is what the European Court of Human Rights judges. The verdict is a victory for the civil rights movements and journalist organizations that had filed the case.

The case was filed as a result of documents that were published via the American whistleblower Edward Snowden. This contained a lot of information about the activities of the British intelligence services.

The court ruled that intelligence services are allowed to collect private information on a large scale, but that there was too little oversight.

Journalists

In addition, too little attention was paid to protecting confidential information of journalists. There were not enough guarantees to ensure that this information was kept safe.

On another point, the complainants did not get what they wanted. According to the court there was nothing wrong with the information exchange with other countries.

British spooks breached citizens’ right to privacy: here.

PRIVATE DATA from human rights organisation Privacy International (PI) was captured and read by Britain’s intelligence agencies, MI5 admitted yesterday. MI5 said the data was collected as part of its Bulk Communications Data (BCD) and Bulk Personal Datasets (BPD) programmes, which “hoover up” public information: here.

Torture victims unlawfully excluded by Home Office‘s new definition, High Court hears, by Sam Tobin in London.