Letter to Guardian from Amnesty, Liberty and Privacy International follows revelation from Investigatory Powers Tribunal about UK monitoring agency

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old



Three leading human rights organisations have called on the prime minister to launch an inquiry into why the intelligence services spied illegally on Amnesty International.

The revelation that GCHQ has been monitoring its communications came in a revised judgment this month from the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the body responsible for handling complaints about state surveillance.

The IPT’s initial ruling said that communications from the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and the South African non-profit Legal Resources Centre had been illegally retained and examined. The tribunal then sent out a correction, explaining it was Amnesty and not the Egyptian organisation that had been snooped on.

Inquiry needed into GCHQ’s spying on us | Letter from Amnesty International, Liberty and Privacy International Read more

In a letter published in the Guardian, Kate Allen, Amnesty’s UK director, Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, and Gus Hosein, the executive director of Privacy International, ask David Cameron to intervene.

“Ever since whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the existence and scale of the US and UK mass surveillance programmes two years ago, campaign groups across the world have been worried that we ourselves might be being spied on,” the letter says.

“We now know definitively that Amnesty International and the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa were. That is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg.”

The interception was only confirmed because “GCHQ fell foul of their own internal rules on handling communications once they had been intercepted”, the letter adds. Other civil liberties groups that complained were merely informed their communications had not been illegally intercepted – they could have been intercepted within the law.

“As human rights organisations, we all work regularly with victims of abuses and government critics,” the letter continued. “That vital work is put in jeopardy if people can justifiably fear that their confidential communications with us might be opened up by governments.”

Amnesty, Liberty and Privacy International want to know which other human rights organisations are being spied on, what information GCHQ was looking at and whether the interception is continuing.

“David Cameron must immediately set up an independent inquiry into how spying on law-abiding human rights organisations was allowed to happen, and what justification there could possibly be for such an invasive and chilling violation of privacy,” the statement concludes.

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In a separate letter sent by Amnesty to Cameron, the human rights group asks for an urgent meeting with the prime minister and for “as much as possible” of the IPT’s secret findings to be published.

Allen, Amnesty UK’s director, said: “It’s absolutely shocking that Amnesty International’s private correspondence was deemed fair game for UK spooks, 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. Snooping on charities is a practice straight out of the KGB handbook. If Amnesty International is being spied on, then is anyone safe?”

Downing Street said it was considering its response to Amnesty International’s letter. It repeated the government statement given at the time of the IPT judgment: “The IPT has confirmed that any interception by GCHQ in these cases was undertaken lawfully and proportionately, however technical errors were identified.

“GCHQ takes procedure very seriously. It is working to rectify the technical errors identified by this case and constantly reviews its processes to identify and make improvements.”