WIEDER AND GUARNIERI v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT
longer than permitted in breach of Article 8 of the Convention. In respect of
another applicant organisation, the IPT found that communications from an
email address associated with it had been intercepted and selected for
examination under a section 8(4) warrant. Although it was satisfied the
interception was lawful and proportionate and that selection for examination
was proportionate, the IPT found that the internal procedure for selection had
not been followed and consequently there had been a breach of the
complainant’s Article 8 rights.
10. The IPT made no finding that the communications of any of the
complainants in the Liberty proceedings had been obtained by US authorities
pursuant to Prism and/or Upstream, and unlawfully shared with the United
Kingdom.
C. The Privacy International campaign
11. There followed a worldwide campaign by Privacy International, one
of the applicants in the Liberty proceedings, through which it sought to
encourage individuals to lodge complaints with the IPT.
12. The applicants in the present case lodged applications with the IPT
with the aid of a standard application form made available on Privacy
International’s website. They alleged that the respondent Government and/or
the security services had breached Articles 8 and 10 of the Convention
because they had and/or continued to intercept, solicit, obtain, process, use,
store and/or retain their information and/or communications; and because
their information and/or communications were accessible to the respondent
Government as part of datasets maintained wholly or in part by other
Governments’ intelligence agencies; and that the Government and/or security
services might have acted unlawfully under domestic law by intercepting,
soliciting, accessing, obtaining, processing, storing or retaining their
information and/or communications in breach of their own internal policies
and procedures.
13. Over 600 applications of a similar nature were received by the IPT.
Of these complainants, 294 were resident in the United Kingdom.
14. The IPT listed the first ten applications (which included those lodged
by the present applicants) for hearing to enable issues to be addressed as to
whether the claims should be investigated. The applicants, together with four
other complainants, were represented in the proceedings; the other four
complainants were neither represented nor identified, except to the extent that
it could be said that three were resident in the United States of America and
one was resident in the United Kingdom.
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