BIG BROTHER WATCH AND OTHERS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT
181
necessary and proportionate and did not impair the very essence of his
Article 6 rights (Kennedy, cited above, §§ 177-179 and §§ 184-191).
510. The Court sees no reason to come to a different conclusion in the
present case. It has already found, in paragraphs 250-265 above, that in
view of the IPT’s extensive power to consider complaints concerning the
wrongful interference with communications pursuant to RIPA, it was an
effective remedy, available in theory and practice, which was capable of
offering redress to persons complaining of both specific incidences of
surveillance and the general Convention compliance of a surveillance
regime. Furthermore, these extensive powers were employed in the
applicants’ case to ensure the fairness of the proceedings; in particular, there
was scrutiny of all the relevant material, open and closed, by the IPT;
material was only withheld from the applicants where the IPT was satisfied
that there were appropriate public interest and national security reasons for
doing so; and finally, the IPT appointed Counsel to the Tribunal to make
submissions on behalf of the applicants in the closed proceedings.
511. Insofar as the applicants complain about the meeting between the
IPT and the intelligence services in 2007, the Court considers that, in view
of the IPT’s specialist role, the fact that its members met with the services to
discuss procedural matters does not, of itself, call into question its
independence and impartiality. Furthermore, the applicants have not
adequately explained how the 2007 meeting impacted on the fairness of
their IPT proceedings in 2014 and 2015. Although the applicants appear to
suggest that the resulting protocol might have affected the IPT’s ability to
access information held about them, the Government’s explanation of the
protocol (namely, that it concerned an agreement not to conduct searches of
databases containing information about the population generally, such as the
Voter’s Roll or telephone directories, unless the data was “relevant or had
been relied on in the course of an investigation”) confirms that it could have
had no impact on the fairness of the IPT proceedings in the present case.
512. Finally, it would appear that the error regarding the identity of the
applicants whose rights were violated was an administrative mistake (see
paragraph 53 above) and, as such, does not indicate any lack of rigour in the
judicial process.
513. Accordingly, the Court considers that the complaint under Article 6
§ 1 of the Convention must be rejected as manifestly ill-founded pursuant to
Article 35 § 3 (a) of the Convention.
V. ALLEGED VIOLATION OF ARTICLE 14 OF THE CONVENTION
COMBINED WITH ARTICLES 8 AND 10 OF THE CONVENTION
514. The applicants in the third of the joined cases further complained
under Article 14 of the Convention, read together with Articles 8 and 10,
that the section 8(4) regime was indirectly discriminatory on grounds of