Amnesty Int'l Lauds ‘Historic’ UK Ruling on Rights Breaches by Spy Agencies

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Amnesty International and several other rights pressure groups announced a "historic victory" in the fight for privacy and freedom of speech against UK and US intelligence services whose mass surveillance programs were found on Friday to be in violation of basic human rights.

"This is an historic victory in the age-old battle for the right to privacy and free expression," Amnesty International UK's legal program director, Rachel Logan, said as quoted in a statement published on the watchdog's website.

This came after UK's top intelligence court upheld on Friday a complaint by Amnesty, Liberty, Privacy International, the American Civil Liberties Union and several others against Britain's spy agencies GCHQ, MI5 and MI6.

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) passed judgment accusing the UK spy networks of sharing surveillance data collected by US National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA was revealed in 2013 to be scooping up millions of telephone calls, faxes, emails, and other types of private communications from sources all over the world.

The Tribunal's ruling was the first to implicate UK secret services since its establishment 15 years ago.

The IPT added that UK spy agencies are now compliant with the European Convention for Human Rights. Amnesty said it "strongly disagrees" with this second part of the ruling, and will bring further challenges against global unwarranted citizen surveillance at the European Court of Human Rights.