After losing in the UK, Privacy International takes its case against government's bulk hacking powers abroad to the European Court of Human Rights
Context & Ripple Effects
Privacy International had already exhausted the domestic route: its challenge to the UK government's bulk hacking powers was rejected in UK courts, so it and five internet and communications providers are re-filing the same grievance at the European Court of Human Rights. The move follows a template set two years earlier by Amnesty International's Strasbourg case over UK mass surveillance, which put the UK's intelligence practices before the same judges.
What makes this filing worth tracking is that the Strasbourg route has since produced results the domestic courts did not: the court went on to find aspects of a former UK regime unlawful in a 2018 ruling covering bulk data collection, and later held that GCHQ's bulk interception of online communications violated the right to privacy.
First-order effects
- The UK government now faces its bulk hacking powers being examined by an international court it cannot dismiss through domestic legal channels, with Privacy International and five communications providers as joint applicants.
Second-order effects
- A growing docket of UK surveillance cases at Strasbourg — Amnesty's mass surveillance application plus this hacking-power challenge — forces the court to rule on British intelligence practices as a body of law rather than case-by-case.
Third-order effects
- If domestic courts keep declining to constrain state hacking, activist groups will keep routing these disputes to supranational courts — a playbook Privacy International itself reused in its challenge to the UK's bid to force Apple to build a data backdoor.
The trend: When national courts defer to state surveillance and hacking powers, civil society litigants increasingly treat the European Court of Human Rights as the binding check on UK intelligence practice.