This morning, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) is expecting the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in a case brought jointly with Liberty and British-Irish Rights Watch.
The case revolves around the interception over a seven year period of all telephone, fax, e-mail and data communications between the UK and Ireland, including legally privileged and confidential information, by an Electronic Test Facility operated by the British Ministry of Defence. During this period all telephone calls, faxes, emails and text messages sent between Ireland and the UK were intercepted and stored en masse to be filtered by the British intelligence services.
Together with Liberty and British-Irish Rights Watch, the ICCL has relied upon Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life and correspondence) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that the mass intercept of all communications between the UK and Ireland was disproportionate and lacked transparency. The ICCL has also argued that the UK failed to address its valid concerns at this invasion of privacy, breaching that State’s obligation under Article 13 to provide an effective remedy when the European Convention on Human Rights is violated.
A press release and the text of the judgment will be available at 10 a.m. (Irish time) on the Court’s Internet site (http://www.echr.coe.int) and a detailed reaction from ICCL will be available shortly thereafter.