The UK has licensed the sale of £75m of telecoms hacking equipment to scores of countries, including several that have launched brutal crackdowns on political dissidents.

The revelation has alarmed human rights groups which question whether UK-made technology is being used by autocrats to target their opponents.

Since 2015, when the figures were first separately collated, the UK has licensed £75m of spyware and surveillance technology, according to an analysis of export licences for telecommunications interception equipment. The specialist technology was sold to several countries which have dubious human rights records and where the actions of their security services have provided cause for concern, including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and Turkey.

Some of the export licences are believed to have been for international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) catchers, which are used to eavesdrop on telephone conversations, others for surveillance software.

“It is not just conventional weapons that can be used for oppression and abuse, it is also monitoring and surveillance equipment,” said Andrew Smith of Campaign Against Arms Trade, which produced the analysis. “It is totally reckless and irresponsible to sell this kind of equipment to regimes that can use it against activists and campaigners.”

Smith questioned what checks were done by government to ensure that the technology was not used to facilitate human rights abuses. “These sales are symptomatic of a policy that has government consistently prioritising arms exports over human rights. Once this equipment has left UK shores it is impossible to adequately regulate how it is used and who it is used against.”

The law firm Leigh Day, acting for the campaign group Global Justice Now, wrote to the Department for International Trade seeking clarification on how the exported surveillance equipment was being used abroad. Attempts to elicit the information via freedom of information requests have yielded little.

“Frankly, as far as the Department for International Trade is concerned, freedom of information has completely broken down,” said Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now.

“They are the worst performing department of the worst performing government we’ve ever had in respecting transparency and freedom of information. This makes it impossible for us to hold them to account for their actions and activities.”

Leigh Day pointed out that the export of IMSI catchers to the Philippines came after its president, Rodrigo Duterte, admitted the state had wiretapped at least two politicians, one of whom was subsequently killed, along with 14 other people, in a raid on his home.“Such misuse of surveillance equipment is concerning in the context of the wider human rights violations perpetrated by Duterte’s regime, which have seen state-sponsored extrajudicial killings by the ‘Davao death squads’, the return of capital punishment, threats, intimidation and imprisonment of critics, journalists and anyone gathering evidence of human rights abuses, and the revelation of a government ‘hit list’ including NGOs and UN figures,” the firm said in its letter to the department.

It also highlighted concerns that intrusion software, capable of remote installation on communication devices to extract data and control functions, may have been exported to Egypt, which has embarked on a crackdown on journalists, bloggers, trade union activists, protesters and others who question government policy or authority.

Specialist surveillance technology capable of the mass surveillance of citizens’ communication was licensed for export to Saudi Arabia, whose agents murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In his letter in response to Leigh Day, Liam Fox, the international business secretary, said export licences were not issued without serious consideration.“We also naturally consider the lmporting state’s attitudes towards international human rights law more widely, and whether there is a direct or causal link between the use of the equipment that might go beyond the specific concerns that you have raised of the repression of dissent and those exercising the right to freedom of expression,” Fox said.

But Edin Omanovich, of the group Privacy International, which campaigns against state surveillance, said the UK’s licensing system needed an urgent overhaul.

“The system is clearly broken if some of the licences are being approved to countries that we know are abusing human rights,” he said.