GCHQ illegally spied on Amnesty International, admits court

'What has been often presented as being the domain of despotic rulers has been done on British soil, by the British government,' said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International's secretary general

GCHQ and other government intelligence agencies illegally spied on the electronic communications of Amnesty International despite previously claiming not to have done so, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has admitted.

Confirmation of the electronic surveillance on the not-for-profit human rights organisation came to Amnesty in an email from the IPT, which said it had "corrected" a previous judgment.

GCHQ has given no indication why Amnesty UK was targeted by surveillance operations, when it was spied on or what communications were obtained.

The initial ruling by the IPT said that GCHQ had illegally retained and examined electronic communications by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and the South African non-profit Legal Resources Centre.

However, it has now been made clear that UK government agencies spied on Amnesty itself by intercepting, accessing and storing its communications.

Amnesty International has slammed the actions of the British government and GCHQ.

"It's outrageous that what has been often presented as being the domain of despotic rulers has been done on British soil, by the British government," said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International's secretary general.

"How can we be expected to carry out our crucial work around the world if human rights defenders and victims of abuse can now credibly believe their confidential correspondence with us is likely to end up in the hands of governments?" he asked.

"After 18 months of litigation and all the denials and subterfuge that entailed, we now have confirmation that we were in fact subjected to UK government mass surveillance," he said.

Shetty argued that the revelations that GCHQ has been spying on Amnesty International "highlights the gross inadequacies in the UK's surveillance legislation".

"If they hadn't stored our communications for longer than they were allowed to, we would never even have known. What's worse, this would have been considered perfectly lawful," he said.

Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, also spoke out against the UK government for illegally spying on Amnesty International and argued that trust in checks and balances has "evaporated".

"Our system of oversight and remedy has fundamentally failed. The communications of one of the world's leading human rights organisations - Amnesty International - were targeted by British spies, unlawfully, and our commissioners and courts failed to realise it," he said.

"Without Edward Snowden, without an 18-month legal battle, without an honest reckoning by whichever individual spotted and admitted this grave error, the unlawful conduct of the British intelligence agencies would never have been exposed by the very court charged with exposing it," he continued.

King described the actions of IPT as "farcical developments" and argued that they demonstrate "the obvious problems with secret tribunals where only one side gets to see, and challenge, the evidence".

"Five experienced judges inspected the secret evidence, seemingly didn't understand it, and wrote a judgment that turned out to be untrue. We need to know why and how this happened," he said.

"Any confidence that our current oversight could keep GCHQ in check has evaporated. Only radical reforms will ensure this never happens again," he concluded.

The latest revelations come a month after Snowden took part in a live Q&A session hosted by Amnesty International UK in which he slammed UK government attempts to secretly pass legislation allowing GCHQ to "hack anybody's computer".

Amnesty international is now calling for an independent inquiry into how and why a UK intelligence agency has been spying on human rights organisations.