EU court challenges GCHQ privacy breach

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ordered British ministers to provide submissions on the mass surveillance by Britain’s spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

The ECHR told the British government to provide the submissions by the beginning of May about whether the spying activities by the GCHQ violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The case, which was brought by campaign groups in October 2013, refers specifically to two surveillance projects by the domestic spying agency, namely Prism and Tempora.

The campaign groups that filed the complaint against the GCHQ are Big Brother Watch, the Open Rights Group and English PEN, along with the German internet activist Constanze Kurz.

Daniel Carey, the lawyer of the groups, said the ECHR has acted “remarkably quickly” for communicating the case to the British government, saying, “It has also acted decisively by requiring the government to explain how the UK’s surveillance practices and oversight mechanisms comply with the right to privacy.”

The legal challenge came after classified documents leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden in June last year revealed that the GCHQ was secretly accessing the network of cables, which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic, and has been sharing the data with its American counterpart the National Security Agency (NSA).

Nick Pickles of Big Brother Watch said the legal challenge would make clear why the British public and parliament have not been properly informed about the scale of surveillance and privacy breach by the GCHQ.

The GCHQ and British ministers have consistently denied that any of the programs revealed by Snowden breached laws.