Report of the Independent Surveillance Review
93
of fairness that we require in other courts and tribunals, including those determining
matters which touch on national security (such as control orders and now TPIM hearings).
Where complaints are rejected … claimants are not given proper reasons but instead the
judicial equivalent of a ‘neither confirm nor deny’ notice’.57
Recent Rulings
4.90
Assessments of the effectiveness of the IPT have been mixed in recent months, as a
result of a number of high-profile rulings. The IPT has gone to some lengths to justify
the procedures it has adopted to ensure that, although key information it needed
to reach a judgment was highly classified and could not be revealed publicly, it was
subject to proper scrutiny by Counsel to the IPT. Cases have also highlighted current
weaknesses in the system.
4.91
In 2015 in Liberty & Others vs. the Security Service, SIS, GCHQ,58 the IPT censured GCHQ
for failing to provide enough detail on the safeguards on how it shared data with US
counterparts until December 2014,59 although it had previously ruled in December
2014 that the UK intelligence-collection methods did not breach the ECHR.60 After two
additional paragraphs of detail were made public, the agencies were found to no longer
have been in contravention of human-rights law. 61
4.92
In April 2015, the IPT ruled in favour of one claimant in a case that examined the
potential interception by the intelligence agencies of legal professional privilege material
involving eight Libyan plaintiffs (commonly referred to as the Belhaj case). This arose in
the course of a case alleging complicity by the UK in the torture and rendition of the
claimants to Libya.
4.93
In June 2015, the IPT ruled that communications intercepted by GCHQ relating to the
Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and the South African non-profit Legal Resources
Centre had been retained longer than they should have been. Amnesty International
was also one of the claimants in the case, but in the original judgment the IPT made
no determination on the organisation’s complaint – implying that either their e-mails
and phone calls had not been not intercepted or that they had been intercepted by
legal means. However, the IPT subsequently sent an e-mail to Amnesty correcting the
judgment and informing the organisation that it was to Amnesty, not the Egyptian
Initiative for Personal Rights, that the ruling applied.
57. Moore, ‘RIP RIPA?’, pp. 128–29.
58. Investigatory Powers Tribunal, Liberty & Others vs. the Security Service, SIS, GCHQ,
IPT/13/77/H, 5 December, 2014.
59. Investigatory Powers Tribunal, ‘Approved Judgment’, Liberty & Others vs. the Security
Service, SIS, GCHQ, IPT/13/77/H, 6 February, 2015.
60. Investigatory Powers Tribunal, ‘Approved Judgment’, Liberty & Others vs. the Security
Service, SIS, GCHQ, IPT/13/77/H, 5 December, 2014.
61. Investigatory Powers Tribunal, ‘Order’, Liberty & Others vs. the Security Service, SIS, GCHQ,
IPT/13/77/H, 6 February, 2015.