The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has held that documents protected by legal privilege and held by GCHQ should be destroyed, but compensation would not be payable to the claimant.
The IPT’s planned hearing was previously reported on the blog here. The hearing was intended to consider any remedies that the IPT should provide on the hypothetical possibility that UK intelligence agencies had unlawfully intercepted privileged communications between Libyan nationals and their lawyers.
The IPT found as follows:
- Whether there had in fact been any relevant interception of the claimants’ privileged communications: in respect of the third claimant only (Sami Al Saadi), two documents that were protected by legal privilege had been held by GCHQ.
- GCHQ was to give an undertaking that the parts of the documents containing legally privileged information would be destroyed or deleted. GCHQ was to provide within 14 days a closed report confirming that the destruction and deletion of the two documents had been carried out. A hard copy of the two documents should be delivered within 7 days to the Interception of Communications Commissioner, to be retained for a period of 5 years, should it be required for further legal proceedings or inquiry.
- However, no compensation would be payable to the third claimant in the present case. Although the information in the two documents in question was covered by privilege, it did not disclose nor refer to any legal advice. There was no use or disclosure of the privileged information for the purpose of defending the civil claim previously brought by the third claimant (Al Saadi and ors v Straw and ors [HQ12X02604]), so Article 6 ECHR had not been breached. Moreover, even if the privileged information had been disclosed to the government defence team, it would not have been of any use nor have provided any litigation advantage to them.
Belhadj and ors v Security Service and ors – judgment (29 April 2015)
Belhadj and ors v Security Service and ors – determination (29 April 2015)
