European Court of Human Rights fast-tracks UK mass surveillance case

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The British government may be doing its best to ignore the surveillance scandal, despite the relatively full official response it’s elicited in the US, but thanks to a coalition of privacy campaigners it seems the tactic won’t work for much longer. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has asked the government to justify the legal grounding and proportionality of its intelligence services’ mass surveillance activities.

The coalition that prompted this, Privacy Not Prism, takes in a variety of other UK activist groups, including Big Brother Watch, Open Rights Group, and English PEN, as well as German campaigner Constanze Kurz, a spokeswoman for the Chaos Computer Club. The campaigners say mass surveillance is disproportionate and illegal under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which gives everyone a right to privacy that cannot be interfered with by public authorities “except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”


European Court of Human Rights fast-tracks UK mass surveillance case