Britain's spy chiefs illegally targeted Amnesty International, rules tribunal

Amnesty International has described the revelation that it was illegally spied upon by the British government's spy agency as "outrageous" and damaging to its work.

The campaigning human rights organisation, the largest in the world, had initially been told by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) last week that it had not been spied upon by GCHQ, Britain's electronic eavesdropping agency.

Amnesty and nine other human rights groups formally complained in April they had been subjected to illegal surveillance.

However, in an email sent to Amnesty on Wednesday, the IPT said that it had made a mistake, and that Amnesty's communications - emails and phone records - had been retrieved by the spy agency, along with those of the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa.

The IPT, the body responsible for complaints over the UK's intelligence services, had initially said that it was the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, another signatory to the initial complaint, that had been surveilled, and not Amnesty.

In a highly critical press release, Amnesty said that the surveillance was akin to that carried out in autocratic regimes.

"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," said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International's secretary-general.

"It's outrageous that what has been often presented as being the domain of despotic rulers has been occurring on British soil, by the British government."

Shetty also pointed out that the knowledge that government agencies had been spying on Amnesty would worry people around the world who trusted the group and wanted to remain discreet.

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

Amnesty also added that the news highlighted the need for surveillance reform in the UK.

"The revelation that the UK government has been spying on Amnesty International highlights the gross inadequacies in the UK's surveillance legislation," Shetty said.

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