News Analysis: Another EU problem looms for UK after snooping revelations

Britain's laws governing the mass surveillance of citizens and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) came under attack last week.

Following revelations that the UK security services monitoring agency GCHQ had spied on a number of civil liberties and human rights groups, including Amnesty International, Liberty and Privacy International, Amnesty wrote a letter to UK Prime Minister David Cameron demanding an independent inquiry.

The surveillance was ruled unlawful under the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), an independent judicial body which hears complaints about surveillance by public bodies, including the security services.

The IPT found a breach of article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) on account of the fact that the intercepted communications of Amnesty were retained for a longer period than envisaged under GCHQ's internal policies.

On July 14, Dutch politician Pieter Omtzigt, rapporteur on mass surveillance for the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), joined the call by Amnesty International for an independent inquiry into the surveillance of human rights organizations.

"Neither Amnesty International, nor any other serious human rights organisations, can by any stretch of the imagination be considered as a terrorist threat to national security, which is the excuse the (American) NSA and their allies have used to justify mass surveillance of innocent people all over the world," he said.

"The work of (human rights) groups is vital for the functioning of our democracies and their interlocutors, who are often victims of serious human rights violations, and are particularly vulnerable," said Omtzigt.

In April 2015, the PACE adopted a report by Omtzigt condemning the mass surveillance practices disclosed by former US intelligence analyst Edward Snowden and called for an intelligence code of practice banning, among other things, untargeted mass surveillance and spying among allies.

"The Prime Minister needs to explain why the UK government is subjecting law-abiding human rights organizations to surveillance," said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International's secretary-general. "This revelation makes it vividly clear that mass surveillance has gone too far. We must have proper checks and balances."

Kate Allen, Amnesty UK's director, added: "It's absolutely shocking that Amnesty International's private correspondence was deemed fair game to UK spooks (spies), who have clearly lost all sense of what is proportionate or appropriate. A key measure of a free society is how it treats its charities and NGOs. If Amnesty International is being spied on, then is anyone safe."

One problem seems to be that laws governing surveillance have not kept pace with technology. A report released last week by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a think tank, highlighted key technical 'blind spots' in current GCHQ oversight and called for a "comprehensive and clear legal framework" governing the surveillance capabilities of intelligence agencies.

The report panel, which included three former British intelligence chiefs, highlighted deficiencies in the existing technical oversight regime, explaining current oversight "does not check the code (that underlies GCHQ's interception capabilities), nor does it have the capacity to do so".

Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, commented: "Every day, the highly technical GCHQ finds new ways to eavesdrop, while our oversight tries to cope with technical blind spots."

"Fundamentally, our safeguards against abuse will not be effective when the core technical activities of GCHQ cannot be kept in check by equally technically-equipped overseers," King added.

On Friday, the British High Court ruled that emergency measures on eavesdropping rushed through Parliament last year were unlawful and has given the UK government nine months to produce new surveillance legislation.

The court backed a judicial challenge from two MPs and other campaigners that powers which compelled telecoms firms to retain customer data for a year were inconsistent with European Union (EU) laws.

At the time, Prime Minister Cameron claimed the measures were vital to protect the country against the threat posed by Islamic State militants and from Britons who have travelled to Iraq and Syria to fight with them.

But the latest row over surveillance could also have major political ramifications. Eurosceptic members of Cameron's government could point to the events of the past few weeks as yet another example of European interference in British domestic policies stoking more anti-EU sentiment.

The British government is committed to holding an in-out referendum on EU membership before the end of 2017.

It also plans to put forward a British Bill of Rights that essentially would break the formal link between British courts and the European Court of Human Rights. Judgments from Strasbourg would, in effect, become advisory and the UK's Supreme Court would have the last word in human rights cases. Endit