The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which provides oversight for UK intelligence services, admitted yesterday that its judgement made on 22 June wrongly failed to declare that Amnesty International had been subject to unlawful surveillance by GCHQ. The IPT revealed this in an e-mail sent to the ten NGO claimants involved in the earlier legal challenge to UK government surveillance. As Amnesty International explained: "Today’s communication makes clear that it was actually Amnesty International Ltd, and not the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) that was spied on in addition to the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa."

The Intercept has obtained a copy of the e-mail sent to the NGOs, which shows that the IPT made the finding that "there had been a breach by virtue of the exceeding of time limits for retention"—the communication files were kept too long. That is, as far as the IPT was concerned, spying on one of the world's most respected NGOs was not in itself problematic.

Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s secretary general, commented: "The revelation that the UK government has been spying on Amnesty International highlights the gross inadequacies in the UK’s surveillance legislation. If they hadn’t stored our communications for longer than they were allowed to by internal guidelines, we would never even have known." If the records had been destroyed according to the rules, the IPT would have made "no determination" as to whether surveillance had taken place—its standard way of neither confirming nor denying allegations that spying has occurred.

Shetty went on to point out: "It’s outrageous that what has been often presented as being the domain of despotic rulers has been occurring on British soil, by the British government." The rationale for intrusive surveillance of the kind carried out by GCHQ is generally that it is only directed against serious threats to the UK public and society and that it is always proportionate and necessary. It is hard to see how the UK government can seriously claim that Amnesty International is a threat or that spying on them is proportionate.

Moreover, this admission that GCHQ is monitoring Amnesty International's communications could have a huge negative impact on its relationships with individuals and organisations: "How can we be expected to carry out our crucial work around the world if human rights defenders and victims of abuses can now credibly believe their confidential correspondence with us is likely to end up in the hands of governments?" Shetty asks. The extent of the information-sharing among the "Five Eyes" group revealed by Edward Snowden means that sensitive information obtained by GCHQ is almost certainly available to the NSA.

Privacy International's Eric King commented: "Today's farcical developments place into sharp relief the obvious problems with secret tribunals where only one side gets to see, and challenge, the evidence. Five experienced judges inspected the secret evidence, seemingly didn't understand it, and wrote a judgment that turned out to be untrue. We need to know why and how this happened." He saw this latest failure of the current oversight system—in the wake of two others this year—as a further sign that change was needed: "Any confidence that our current oversight could keep GCHQ in check has evaporated. Only radical reforms will ensure this never happens again."