Human Rights Watch & Ors v SoS for the Foreign &
Commonwealth Office & Ors
MR JUSTICE BURTON
Approved Judgment
Privacy International is not representing you in your claim
before the IPT. You are responsible for filing your claim and
following up with any requests for additional information or
action that you may receive from the IPT.
To start your claim, please click on the link below that applies
to you.”
8.
A standard application form was made available by Privacy International. The Ten
Claimants made use of this to present their claims, attaching it to Tribunal Forms T1
and T2, the former relating to human rights claims and the latter to non human rights
claims. These, apart from giving the names, addresses and, where relevant, dates of
birth, of the Claimants, and identifying the proposed Respondents, simply crossreferred to the standard form to which we have referred.
9.
There have been 663 such applications, following that same course. The Tribunal has
listed for hearing the first ten applications received, in order to enable issues to be
addressed as to whether the claims should be investigated. Of the Ten, six are
represented by counsel, Ben Jaffey, and solicitors, Messers Bhatt Murphy, pro bono,
(“the Six”), and we have been very grateful for their contribution to the debate which
has taken place before us between them, on behalf of the Six, but also clearly
inferentially on behalf not only of the remainder of the Ten, but of all 663 Claimants,
and the Respondents, represented by James Eadie QC and Kate Grange, as to whether,
and if so on what basis, any of the Six, the Ten or the 663 applications should be
considered and investigated by the Tribunal.
10.
The standard form Statement of Grounds supplied by Privacy International and used
by each of the 663 Claimants reads as follows:1)
“[…] is a resident of […]
2)
I believe that the Respondents have and/or continue to intercept,
solicit, access, obtain, process, use, store and/or retain my information
and/or communications. I also believe that that my information and/or
communications are accessible to the Respondents as part of datasets
maintained, in part, or wholly, by other governments’ intelligence
agencies.
3)
In so doing, the UK Government has breached Article 8 and 10 of the
European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), as incorporated into
UK law by the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA).
4)
This Tribunal has already concluded that, to the extent my information
was shared with the UK Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ) by the US National Security Agency (NSA) prior to 5
December 2014, such action was unlawful and a violation of Article 8
of the ECHR [Liberty/Privacy No 2].
5)
If my information was so shared, I request a determination pursuant to
Section 68(4) of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000
(RIPA) that such unlawful sharing occurred, with a summary of that