A rare public hearing of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has for the first time revealed details of UK security services\u2019 secret policies on the interception of private calls between lawyers and their clients.<\/p>\n
The existence of the secret policies on legally-privileged material emerged in the course of a torture case brought by legal charity Reprieve and others, on behalf of Libyan rendition victims Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, Sami al-Saadi and their families.<\/p>\n
Lawyers for Mr Belhaj and Mr al-Saadi \u2014 who in 2004 were abducted with their families in a joint MI6-Libyan operation and rendered to Libya, where they faced years of torture \u2014 are fighting to have these policies disclosed, saying they fear their conversations with their clients have been spied on. The confidentiality of those conversations is bound by legal professional privilege (LPP).<\/p>\n
In documents discussed at yesterday\u2019s hearing, the Government admitted that the policies provide \u201cguidance\u201d on the sharing of privileged material with security service personnel who are subject to litigation \u2014 such as in the Belhaj and al-Saadi case \u2014 but refused to say whether such sharing would take place.<\/p>\n
In response to questions on this and related issues, the Government\u2019s lawyers said that to answer fully \u201cwould be damaging to the public interest or prejudicial to national security.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cori Crider, Reprieve strategic director and a lawyer for the Belhaj and Saadi families<\/strong>, said: \u201cMI6 helped kidnap my clients and ‘rendered’ them to Gaddafi’s dungeons – but the security services’ misdeeds didn’t stop there. We now know that each security service has at least a policy on their interception of privileged lawyer-client conversations \u2014 policies they claim are \u2018too secret\u2019 to disclose.<\/p>\n \u201cThe reason for these hard-line tactics is clear: there is a real risk that privileged information has been improperly used in our clients’ torture claims. If it\u2019s true that information from their spying has tainted government officials or lawyers involved in the Libyan torture cases, then the government has a massive problem on its hands.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A rare public hearing of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has for the first time revealed details of UK security services\u2019 secret policies on the interception of private calls between lawyers and their clients. The existence of the secret policies on legally-privileged material emerged in the course of a torture case brought by legal charity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":116640,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,1614],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-140903","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-surveillance-big-brother"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140903\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}