The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, says he will launch an investigation into reports that Britain spied on other governments at two successive global climate summits, snooping on other delegations’ kit, passes and membership lists.

A government document released by Edward Snowden showed that an officer from GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping agency, had been embedded in the official British delegation to the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 and at Cancun in Mexico.

Speaking to Danish television, Ban said the matter was a UN issue because Copenhagen was a UN conference. “All diplomatic information is inviolable. If there has been any breach … they should be investigated. UN information should be protected in its entire confidentiality,” he said.



The presence of a GCHQ spy at UN meetings attended by world leaders including the US president, Barack Obama, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, is described in the 23-page PowerPoint presentation “Supporting HMG’s (Her Majesty’s Government) Climate Change Ambitions”. Delivered to unnamed UK government officers in 2011, the paper originally published by Dagbladet Information states that the officer reported to “customers” including No 10, the foreign secretary and diplomats, the Department for International Development, the business department, and the Treasury.

According to the presentation, it became a “serious intelligence priority” for the British secret intelligence services (SIS) to spy on UN international climate negotiations in 2007.

However, the first time a spy was sent to a summit was in 2009 when countries were expected to conclude years of tense negotiations with a dramatic global deal to reduce carbon emissions. The GCHQ operation was said to have been a success, even though the talks are generally considered to have failed.

The PowerPoint slides state that the officer was embedded in the UK delegation of 38 people because this cover would allow access to foreign delegations and to “kit, passes, and delegate lists”. The officer was expected to coordinate with GCHQ in Cheltenham as well as MI5.



The role of the officer, according to one slide, was to discover countries’ negotiating positions, report on how far they were prepared to negotiate, find out whether foreign negotiators were receiving instructions from their own governments and to report these back to UK officials to give Britain an upper hand.



But Britain could have been breaking international law in sending a spy because the venue of all UN climate summits is declared to be UN territory for the duration of the negotiations.

The disclosures are potentially embarrassing for Ed Miliband, who was energy and climate change secretary and leader of the British delegation at the 2009 Copenhagen summit, and Chris Huhne, who led the delegation in 2011 to Cancun.



The Labour party declined to comment on Monday night on whether Miliband had been aware that the embedded “communications officer” was working with MI5 and GCHQ in Cheltenham to intercept emails and phone calls. “We do not comment on intelligence matters,” a party spokesman said.

But Huhne said: “I was aware that we had GCHQ support for our own secure communications, but I don’t know anything about that. I was in no briefing beyond the normal ones we got from our negotiators.”



The document also reveals the security services’ preoccupations. Under the title “new challenges for intelligence”, GCHQ asks whether foreign governments are “planning for instability or mass migrations” caused by water and food scarcity, and whether they are making the link between extreme weather and high commodity prices.

The presentation also asks: “Is the United Nations framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) still important or is private capital going to low carbon because costs and resource scarcity makes sense?”



The disclosures come as the negotiating teams of hundreds of countries meet in Venezuela before next month’s UN climate summit. It follows the leak of other Snowden documents last year which showed how the US National Security Agency (NSA) monitored communications between key countries before and during the Copenhagen conference to give their negotiators advance information about other positions at the meeting.



WikiLeaks cables in 2010 showed that the CIA had asked US diplomats to pass on the negotiating positions of key countries at Copenhagen and to report deals between nations.



Asad Rehman, international climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “It’s long been a fact that rich governments have bullied and bribed poorer developing countries to get their way in the climate negotiations – we can now add spying to that list. It’s morally and politically bankrupt for the UK government to try and undermine the voices of those most affected by climate change in calling for more action.”



A spokesman for the UNFCCC, which hosts the summits, declined to comment.



“This practice is unfortunately expected from developed countries like the United Kingdom. Developed countries have continuously broken trust and failed to live up to their commitments, this shameful practice, in concert with the NSA boys is a spit in the face of the developing world and frontline communities impacted by climate change.”, said Julian Velez, a Mexican delegate to the meeting in Venezuela.

