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After nine years of legal battle by civil rights groups in London and Dublin, the European Court of Human Rights ruled on 1 July 2008 that UK Government had violated Human Rights by tapping their communications between 1990 and 1997.
Liberty groups, along with British Irish Rights Watch and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, have claimed their communications were subject to indiscriminate surveillance by MoD's Electronic Test Facility that had eavesdropped on their phone, fax, email and data communications between 1990 and 1997.
After having first lodged complaints with the UK's Interception of Communications Tribunal, the DPP and the Investigatory Powers Tribunal without results because the local courts ruled "there was no contravention to the Interception of Powers Act 1985". Finally, the groups obtained the European Human Rights Court ruling that the UK had violated article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights providing the right to respect for private and family life and correspondence.
The court found that the 1985 Act has given the UK government "virtually unlimited" discretion to intercept communications between the UK and an external receiver, as well as "wide discretion" to decide which communications were listened to or read. The government had guidelines to ensure a "safeguard against abuse of power", but the UK's 1985 interception law "had not indicated with sufficient clarity... the scope or manner of the exercise of the very wide discretion of the conferred on the State to intercept and examine external communications" so as to guard against abuse of power.
For 10 years now, the 1985 Act has been replaced by RIPA which has the same objective to detect terrorism and serious crime but it is mostly applied by local councils for minor infringements.
The court ruled that procedures regarding the use and storage of intercepted material should be established so as to make these procedures more transparent for the public. "While secret surveillance is a valuable tool, the mechanisms for intercepting our telephone calls and emails should be as open and accountable as possible, and should ensure proportionate use of very wide powers" said Alex Gask, Liberty's legal officer.
The ruling will have strong implications for UK's present legislation on phonetapping and interception of communications, and as Mark Kelly, Director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties believes, clear implications for many other member states of the Council of Europe member states, such as Ireland: "Our lax data interception regime will require a thorough overhaul in order to ensure that it meets the standards required by the European Court of Human Rights under Article 8."
Liberty called for an overhaul of RIPA. However, the Home Office stated on 2 July it did not think the ruling had any implications on RIPA and UK's current legislation covering covert investigations.
Court rules 90s UK.gov wiretaps violated human rights (2.07.2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/02/echr_ripa_judgement/
Security: UK phonetap laws breach privacy (2.07.2008)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jul/02/privacy.humanrights
UK surveillance breaches human rights, rules ECHR (2.07.2008)
http://www.out-law.com/page-9228