WIEDER AND GUARNIERI v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT
be intercepted, stored and searched even if neither the sender nor recipient is
of interest to the intelligence agencies. Moreover, the nature of electronic
communications is such that the sender will not know which countries his
communications passed through en route to the recipients, and cannot,
therefore, know which States’ intelligence agencies might have had the
opportunity to intercept them. Nonetheless, as the Convention does not
provide for the institution of an actio popularis or for a review the relevant
law and practice in abstracto (see Roman Zakharov, cited above, § 164),
potential applicants must take steps to substantiate their claim that they were
potentially at risk of having their communications intercepted, searched and
possibly even examined under the impugned surveillance regime.
100. In the present case, it is not necessary for the Court to give detailed
consideration to this question since the IPT, referring to the Court’s case-law,
expressly accepted that the applicants had victim status in respect of their
Article 8 complaint concerning the section 8(4) regime (see paragraph 21
above). The Government did not challenge that finding and Court would
therefore accept that the applicants in the present case can claim to be victims
of the alleged violation for the purposes of Article 34 of the Convention.
3. Admissibility
101. The complaint under Article 8 of the Convention is neither
manifestly ill-founded nor inadmissible on any other grounds listed in
Article 35 of the Convention.
102. The Article 8 complaint must therefore be declared admissible.
4. Merits
103. The Government accepted that there had been a breach of Article 8
of the Convention by virtue only of the respects in which the section 8(4)
regime was held by the Grand Chamber in Big Brother Watch and Others
(cited above) to violate that Article.
104. As the applicants do not contend that there has been any other
violation of their rights under Article 8 of the Convention, the Court, for the
reasons identified in Big Brother Watch and Others (namely, the absence of
independent authorisation, the failure to include the categories of selectors in
the application for a warrant, and the failure to subject selectors linked to an
individual to prior internal authorisation (ibid, §§ 377-82)), finds that there
has been a violation of that Article.
B. Article 10 of the Convention
105. Under Article 10 of the Convention the applicants made identical
complaints to those previously examined under Article 8 concerning the
operation of the regime under section 8(4) of RIPA.
30
Select target paragraph3
Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents