WIEDER AND GUARNIERI v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT (b) Jurisdiction (i) The parties’ submissions (α) The Government 74. The Government asserted that the interception of communications by a Contracting State did not fall within that State’s jurisdictional competence for the purposes of Article 1 of the Convention when the sender or recipient complaining of a breach of their Article 8 rights was outside the territory of the Contracting State. 75. The Government argued that a State’s jurisdiction within the meaning of Article 1 of the Convention was primarily territorial. Any other basis of jurisdiction was exceptional and required special justification in the particular circumstances (see Banković and Others v. Belgium and Others (dec.) [GC], no. 52207/99, § 61, ECHR 2001-XII). In Al-Skeini and Others v. the United Kingdom [GC], no. 55721/07, §§ 133-42, ECHR 2011 the Grand Chamber had set out three exceptions to the territorial basis of jurisdiction: State agent authority and control; effective control over an area; and the Convention legal space (“espace juridique”). The first of these categories was divided into three sub-categories (Al-Skeini and Others, cited above, §§ 134-36): acts of diplomatic and consular agents exercising authority and control over others; the exercise of some or all of the public powers normally exercised by the Government of another State, through that Government’s consent, invitation or acquiescence; and the use of force by State agents operating extra-territorially. Before the IPT, the applicants had not relied on any of these exceptions, save as to argue that Mr Guarnieri was within the “espace juridique” of the Convention. Before the Court, however, they asserted that the respondent Government exercised control over them by intercepting, accessing, extracting, filtering, storing, analysing and disseminating their communications. The Government contested this argument. 76. For the Government, the interception of communications and related communications data would not involve the exercise of authority and control over the individual whose privacy was interfered with. Given that intercepted communications nevertheless continued on to the recipient, GCHQ could not be said to have exercised full authority and control over those communications, much less over the sender or recipient. 77. The Government further argued that neither of the other two exceptions to the territorial basis of jurisdiction applied. As it was common ground that the applicants had not been physically present in the United Kingdom at any relevant point, any interference with their privacy or freedom of expression must have taken place outside the United Kingdom. In this regard, the Government disputed that the interference with the applicants’ rights under Article 8 of the Convention was the interception, extraction, filtering, storage, analysis and dissemination of intercepted content and related communications data. For the Government, a person’s private life was 23