The UK government’s mass surveillance program known as “Big Brother” violated human rights and had “no real safeguards,” the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has said in a landmark ruling.
Ruling in the case which was brought by a group of journalists and rights activists, Europe’s top rights court in Strasbourg, France, said Thursday the interception of journalistic material also violated the right to freedom of information.
The ECHR judges voted by five to two that the mass trawling for information violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights guaranteeing the right to privacy, ruling that the safeguards governing the selection of the data were “inadequate”.
“While the Court was satisfied that the intelligence services of the United Kingdom take their (European human rights) Convention obligations seriously and are not abusing their powers, it found that there was inadequate independent oversight of the…