2018. The decisions announced on 25th September, summarised above, give effect to
the conclusions reached in the first judgment in 2016 and the third judgment in 2018.
The reasons for those judgments have already been fully set out and published and
nothing further needs to be said about them. The determinations made and recorded
above followed from the conclusions in those judgments and the reasons are already
apparent.
5.
An issue arose at the hearing of 25th September on which it is necessary to express
some conclusions which are not related to the determinations. During the development
of the evidence between the first and the third judgment it emerged that there was data
held by the Security Service in a section of its systems called “workings” which related
to the Claimant. Officers when using the datasets created a note of what had been done
and copied material into this section of the system so that they could work on it. It was
not routinely deleted when the work was complete, and there was no routine deletion
policy. This related to the period of time when material was unlawfully held by reason
of the decision in the first judgment.
6.
This issue first became known to the Tribunal and the Claimant in the Respondents’
Re-Amended Open Response to the Claimants’ Request for Further Information
Relating to Searches (RFI Response) served in October 2017, and was again revealed in
the Respondents’ Re-Amended Report to the IPT on Searches disclosed in OPEN on
14th September 2018. Its emergence into that document caused renewed focus on it.
Counsel for the Respondents informed the Tribunal on instructions that the material had
been recently deleted. The Tribunal directed a witness statement to indicate what had
been done, and to ascertain whether any copy had been kept so that IPCO could see
what had happened.