British lawmakers are not immune from communications-monitoring, a British court ruled Wednesday, saying a 50-year-old doctrine protecting them from phone tapping has no legal force.
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The IPT declared that the Wilson Doctrine could only be considered to apply to “targeted, and not incidental” interception of parliamentary communications.
She said: ‘This judgment is a body blow for parliamentary democracy.
In its ruling, however, the IPT ruled that parliamentarians could have no “substantive legitimate expectation” that their correspondence not be caught up in mass surveillance systems as a result of the Wilson Doctrine.
In July, counsel Ben Jaffey told the panel, headed by Mr Justice Burton, that the preliminary hearing, which was contested by the Security Services, was about what safeguards were required before members of the legislature were subject to intercept or surveillance.
Lucas also turned blame onto the government, accusing Prime Minister David Cameron of being “deliberately ambiguous” over the issue of the Wilson Doctrine.
The ruling from those proceedings sparked anger amongst MPs, prompting emergency questions in Parliament and calls from MPs for statements by John Bercow, the Commons Speaker and the Government.
The Labour MP Sadiq Khan, who had his conversations with a prisoner in a jail bugged in 2005, was deemed by the then surveillance commissioner not to have been protected by the Wilson doctrine. “That’s why upcoming legislation on surveillance must include a provision to protect the communications of MPs, Peers, MSPs, AMs [Welsh assembly members] and MEPS from extra-judicial spying”.
They argued that the data-gathering violated the Wilson Doctrine, which was implemented by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1966. Today’s judgment shows that they were wrong to place any reliance on these assurances.
“The regime for the interception of parliamentarians’ communications is in accordance with the law under article 8(2) and prescribed by law under article 10(2), in particular by reference to s5(3) of Ripa [Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000]”.
“The Wilson doctrine, as now enunciated and put into effect, highlights a need for caution and circumspection in respect of parliamentarians’ communications”.
And human rights group Liberty policy officer Sara Ogilvie said the decision “laid bare the inadequacies of surveillance laws”.
A Government spokesman said: “The IPT has comprehensively rejected the claim brought by a number of Parliamentarians that their communications were improperly intercepted and has found that all activity has been within the law”.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair then addressed the issue while in office in 1997, claiming that the doctrine had been expanded to encompass all means of electronic communication. Any change to the doctrine would be reported by the PM to Parliament. However the government’s priorities for updating legislation in this area have focused on plugging so called “capability gaps” for intelligence agencies, rather than on restricting or rolling back digital surveillance – so the bill is widely expected to seek to expand powers, with fears of a new United Kingdom “Snoopers” Charter’ incoming.
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Senior judges said that, while the so-called Wilson Doctrine prevented “targeted” tapping of such communications, it did not bar the “incidental” collection of data by Britain’s listening post GCHQ.
