As the Guardian's revelations show, this tribunal's so-called scrutiny of the security services is a living shame to the UK
For 14 years the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has operated from within the Home Office, against all the principles of the separation of powers, in absolute secrecy and with nothing more than a post office box and postcode to locate its highly suspect deliberations.
In nearly a decade and half, just 10 out of 1,500 complaints against the behaviour of UK's intelligence services, and other authorities permitted to conduct surveillance operations under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), have been upheld.
The location of the tribunal has been a mystery even to the most distinguished QCs, who struggle to hold to account the intelligence services. Last month, I talked to one who had begun to suspect that the tribunal was actually in MI6. It might as well have been, for all the transparency that is available to those applying to the tribunal, their representatives and the British public – a public that is, of course, paying the bills for the UK's superstructure of murmuring spooks, huddled judges and paranoid mandarins.
This revelation about the tribunal says a lot about the compulsive secrecy of the British establishment, which Nick Pickles, head of the excellent Big Brother Watch, likens to an addiction – a morbid condition of some sort. But it also, I am afraid, says something about British complacency. Our trust in these people to do the right thing behind closed doors on matters where the state's interests are so aggressively defended is really alarming.
That so few complaints against the intelligence agencies have ever been upheld at the tribunal, and just a few paltry sums in compensation have been paid, is all you need to know about the justice available there. We should see it for what it is: a secret operation, designed to stifle legitimate complaints against the authorities.
In the past 15 years the legal system has embraced secret immigration tribunals, secret courts and the IPT, in which lawyers and claimants have little, if any, idea of the processes to which they are party and subject.
This is a living shame to the United Kingdom. The idea that our politicians go about the world lecturing others on the rule of law or standards of justice is absolutely preposterous. But it is a hypocrisy that is permitted to exist because we do not hold their feet to the fire and demand to know why money is spent on ring-fencing their power.
The purpose of the tradition of separation of powers, first developed in ancient Greece, is to guard the integrity of different branches of government: the legislature, executive and judiciary. Of these, the most obviously vulnerable to malign influence is the judiciary. In a way the judiciary is the canary in the mine, because when courts and tribunals close their doors and won't tell lawyers and complainants what is going on, you know that an essential part of a free society is in the process of being degraded.
When Charles Clarke was home secretary, he often complained that he could never talk to senior law lords about, among other things, terror laws. This was met with amazement from the late Lord Bingham, then senior law lord, who once told me that he was astonished that a home secretary did not understand the very first principle of democratic separation of powers.
Unlike the rest of us, Clarke must have known that the IPT was operating in the Home Office – which is to say that a judicial process was in reality held captive by a part of the executive that happens to run the internal intelligence service, MI5. Location is everything, and it seems likely that if the tribunal had been situated outside the Home Office, with personnel who were independent of the department's shadowy nexus of civil servants and spies, many more complaints against the intelligence services would have been upheld. As Ian Cobain and Leila Haddou reveal in the Guardian, a senior member of the IPT secretariat was believed to be formerly part of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism. That hardly gives you confidence about the quality of justice in the tribunal.
The whole shoddy, backstairs arrangement stinks. We have the president of the tribunal, Sir Michael Burton, arguing that his work needs to be done in secret to secure the trust and co-operation of the intelligence services – but what about the trust of the British people and the confidence of the lawyers who seek to establish the rights of ordinary members of the public? How can we possibly trust a PO box to dispense satisfactory justice? How can we have any faith when we don't even know where the court is located, and the names of the staff are kept secret as if they were intelligence officers in the field?
The most telling detail of the Cobain-Haddou story is not only that the court will not say whether it has made a ruling on the bulk collection of data from the communications of innocent people, but that it is not even allowed to do so without the permission of GCHQ. Quod erat demonstrandum: the court is constrained by the very people in the executive that it seeks to oversee.
What needs to happen is a complete re-examination of Labour's Ripa, not just concerning the secret IPT, but also the vaguely drafted section that allows the intelligence services the freedom to gather everyone's communications and private details. This section was memorably captured by the computer and security expert Caspar Bowden, who wrote: "Interpreting that section requires the unravelling of a triple-nested inversion of meanings across six cross-referenced subsections, linked to a dozen other cross-linked definitions, which are all dependent on a highly ambiguous 'notwithstanding'."
Let's have the law and the courts out in the open so that everyone understands what the hell is going on. Our free society depends on it. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.
For 14 years the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has operated from within the Home Office, against all the principles of the separation of powers, in absolute secrecy and with nothing more than a post office box and postcode to locate its highly suspect deliberations.
In nearly a decade and half, just 10 out of 1,500 complaints against the behaviour of UK's intelligence services, and other authorities permitted to conduct surveillance operations under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), have been upheld.
The location of the tribunal has been a mystery even to the most distinguished QCs, who struggle to hold to account the intelligence services. Last month, I talked to one who had begun to suspect that the tribunal was actually in MI6. It might as well have been, for all the transparency that is available to those applying to the tribunal, their representatives and the British public – a public that is, of course, paying the bills for the UK's superstructure of murmuring spooks, huddled judges and paranoid mandarins.
This revelation about the tribunal says a lot about the compulsive secrecy of the British establishment, which Nick Pickles, head of the excellent Big Brother Watch, likens to an addiction – a morbid condition of some sort. But it also, I am afraid, says something about British complacency. Our trust in these people to do the right thing behind closed doors on matters where the state's interests are so aggressively defended is really alarming.
That so few complaints against the intelligence agencies have ever been upheld at the tribunal, and just a few paltry sums in compensation have been paid, is all you need to know about the justice available there. We should see it for what it is: a secret operation, designed to stifle legitimate complaints against the authorities.
In the past 15 years the legal system has embraced secret immigration tribunals, secret courts and the IPT, in which lawyers and claimants have little, if any, idea of the processes to which they are party and subject.
This is a living shame to the United Kingdom. The idea that our politicians go about the world lecturing others on the rule of law or standards of justice is absolutely preposterous. But it is a hypocrisy that is permitted to exist because we do not hold their feet to the fire and demand to know why money is spent on ring-fencing their power.
The purpose of the tradition of separation of powers, first developed in ancient Greece, is to guard the integrity of different branches of government: the legislature, executive and judiciary. Of these, the most obviously vulnerable to malign influence is the judiciary. In a way the judiciary is the canary in the mine, because when courts and tribunals close their doors and won't tell lawyers and complainants what is going on, you know that an essential part of a free society is in the process of being degraded.
When Charles Clarke was home secretary, he often complained that he could never talk to senior law lords about, among other things, terror laws. This was met with amazement from the late Lord Bingham, then senior law lord, who once told me that he was astonished that a home secretary did not understand the very first principle of democratic separation of powers.
Unlike the rest of us, Clarke must have known that the IPT was operating in the Home Office – which is to say that a judicial process was in reality held captive by a part of the executive that happens to run the internal intelligence service, MI5. Location is everything, and it seems likely that if the tribunal had been situated outside the Home Office, with personnel who were independent of the department's shadowy nexus of civil servants and spies, many more complaints against the intelligence services would have been upheld. As Ian Cobain and Leila Haddou reveal in the Guardian, a senior member of the IPT secretariat was believed to be formerly part of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism. That hardly gives you confidence about the quality of justice in the tribunal.
The whole shoddy, backstairs arrangement stinks. We have the president of the tribunal, Sir Michael Burton, arguing that his work needs to be done in secret to secure the trust and co-operation of the intelligence services – but what about the trust of the British people and the confidence of the lawyers who seek to establish the rights of ordinary members of the public? How can we possibly trust a PO box to dispense satisfactory justice? How can we have any faith when we don't even know where the court is located, and the names of the staff are kept secret as if they were intelligence officers in the field?
The most telling detail of the Cobain-Haddou story is not only that the court will not say whether it has made a ruling on the bulk collection of data from the communications of innocent people, but that it is not even allowed to do so without the permission of GCHQ. Quod erat demonstrandum: the court is constrained by the very people in the executive that it seeks to oversee.
What needs to happen is a complete re-examination of Labour's Ripa, not just concerning the secret IPT, but also the vaguely drafted section that allows the intelligence services the freedom to gather everyone's communications and private details. This section was memorably captured by the computer and security expert Caspar Bowden, who wrote: "Interpreting that section requires the unravelling of a triple-nested inversion of meanings across six cross-referenced subsections, linked to a dozen other cross-linked definitions, which are all dependent on a highly ambiguous 'notwithstanding'."
Let's have the law and the courts out in the open so that everyone understands what the hell is going on. Our free society depends on it. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.