Police Scotland has been ordered to pay a journalist £10,000 in damages after it illegally intercepted his communications data in an investigation into a botched murder case.



The investigatory powers tribunal ruled the force had breached the human rights of Gerard Gallacher, a former police officer turned freelance journalist, who had spent 18 months investigating a cold murder case in which a prime suspect had been released without charge.

Gallacher said he suffered “invasion of privacy, familial strife, personal stress and strain and loss of long-standing friendships” after detectives accessed 32 days of his communications data, ignoring clear court rulings to protect journalists and their sources.



Police Scotland had been braced for an adverse ruling after Sir Stanley Burnton, the communications interception commissioner, ruled last November that the force had been reckless in its repeated abuse of its powers.

Detectives in an elite anti-corruption unit breached the law five times when they collected phone records for Gallacher and two police officers suspected of leaking information, Burnton said.

In its ruling on Monday on the cases of the six people affected – Gerard Gallacher and his wife Marjorie, the two officers David Moran and Steven Adams and a former officer and his wife named only as Mr and Mrs O – the tribunal agreed that the collection of their data breached the Human Rights Act and the European convention on human rights.



Only Gallacher sought damages from the tribunal, and he was awarded £10,000 for stress and loss of earnings.

The hearing focused on Gallacher’s investigation into the unsolved murder of Emma Caldwell in woods 40 miles from Glasgow in 2005, which sparked a huge police inquiry.

Four Turkish men were arrested after an operation involving police from several countries and covert surveillance, but the trial collapsed after prosecutors realised the evidence against them was flawed.

In 2013 Gallacher discovered that officers involved in the original case were upset that another suspect, who had admitted having sex with Caldwell in the same woods on numerous occasions, was allowed to go free without being charged seven months before the Turkish men were arrested.

The Sunday Mail then ran a series of articles on the case based on Gallacher’s investigations over three successive weekends in May 2015. Prosecutors ordered Police Scotland to reopen the case, and the anti-corruption unit secretly opened its own parallel investigation into whether serving or former police officers had leaked intelligence to Gallacher.

The tribunal stated that the detectives involved were told explicitly by a Police Scotland specialist that they needed a judge’s approval to bug a journalist or intercept their data, but the advice was ignored.

In its ruling, the tribunal said the force also failed to assess whether seeking the data was proportional. It had “no coherent view as to what, if any, crime might have been committed by any person” and had no intelligence that one claimant had leaked the material to Gallacher or had even had access to it.

Deputy chief constable Iain Livingstone said the force had already ordered an external review into the affair by Mike Barton, the head of Durham constabulary.



The active investigation limited what he could say, Livingstone said, but he added that there had already been two reviews, both internally and by the HM Inspectorate of Constabulary Scotland, to ensure such breaches did not reoccur. “Police Scotland has fully accepted that standards fell below those required in this case,” he said.

Moran said he was critical of the limited scope of Barton’s enquiry, because it did not cover criminal misconduct by the officers involved. The tribunal evidence made clear that every element of the case needed to be independently and impartially investigated, he said.



“Nobody, including myself, knows the full detail of what happened, the level it reached within Police Scotland and who exactly caused officers to break the laws and codes governing the interception of communications,” he said. “Until that is fully established then, in my opinion, no assumption should be made that criminality was not involved.”



David Kennedy, the deputy general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation (SPF) said: “This judgment leaves no doubt that the actions of the Police Service of Scotland towards our members [and others] breached their human rights. The SPF had no hesitation in supporting our members in seeking remedy for this breach, and we sincerely hope the service will reflect on this ruling when considering their future actions.”



Paul Holleran, the Scottish regional secretary of the National Union of Journalists, said: “The police have been riding roughshod over people’s rights and we want an end to that. We welcome the recognition that their behaviour was out of order. Hopefully this will be a lesson learned.”