First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 29
Paragraph- Paragraph text
- Moves in this direction continue with the passage of the third reading of the Investigatory Powers Bill in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. The Bill is scheduled to continue to be considered at the Committee stage in the House of Lords in September 2016. The Special Rapporteur must assume that readers are also familiar with the criticism he made of the Bill in his report of 9 March 2016. The part of the Bill which deals with mass surveillance and bulk hacking continues to be under international scrutiny. The Court of Justice of the European Union is set to rule on the matter following an opinion expressed by the Advocate General of the Court, on 19 July 2016, that bulk processing is only legal in cases of serious crime, which is a far narrower use than that permissible under the Bill. The Bill remains a privacy minefield, a thorough analysis of which would require 10 times the 10,300 word limit that the present report must respect, but the battle is happily being valiantly fought by Ministers of Parliament, Liberty, the Law Society, the Open Rights Group and Privacy International. It can only be hoped that the Government of the United Kingdom presses the pause button, listens carefully to what both the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice have to say about surveillance and lets sanity prevail. It would also do well to listen to some members of its own House of Lords. Lord Paddick, a former senior police officer, has lambasted the Bill's provisions dealing with Internet connection records, saying: "Internet connection records - the only virgin territory in the Bill - are going to intrude into innocent people's privacy." He later argues that the catch-all nature of Internet connection records is disproportionate given the warrantless access the Bill affords to police of this personal data on all Internet users in the United Kingdom.
- Legal status
- Non-negotiated soft law
- Body
- Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy
- Document type
- Special Procedures' report
- Means of adoption
- N.A.
- Topic(s)
- Governance & Rule of Law
- Person(s) affected
- N.A.
- Year
- 2016
- Paragraph type
- Other
- Paragraph number
- 29
sorted by
Date added
30 relationships, 30 entities