UK: RSF welcomes landmark ruling on unlawful police surveillance of journalists in Northern Ireland
A UK tribunal has found that police services in Northern Ireland and England unlawfully spied on two investigative journalists in order to get to their sources. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) welcomes the landmark ruling, which sheds light on shocking violations of press freedom and underscores the vital legal right of journalists to protect their sources.
On 17 December, the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) — an independent judicial body which hears complaints about surveillance by public authorities — quashed a Direct Surveillance Authorisation (DSA) issued by Police Service Northern Ireland (PSNI) in 2018 so it could monitor whether journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey met with a suspected source. The IPT said the DSA was incompatible with the journalists’ rights under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The IPT also quashed authorisations to monitor Birney and McCaffrey’s phone data, granted in 2012 by the Metropolitan Police and in 2013 by PSNI. Birney and McCaffrey were each awarded £4,000 in damages.
This is a landmark case for press freedom. It is deeply shocking that police showed such disregard for the vital right of journalists to protect their confidential sources, a right that lies at the heart of public interest reporting, and this case - which has taken far too long to be exposed - may yet be the tip of the iceberg. While we welcome the tribunal’s judgment, we urgently need robust and transparent safeguards put in place to ensure such abuses of due process never take place again.
Birney and McCaffrey, award-winning journalists from Northern Ireland, were arrested in dawn raids on their houses in 2018 on suspicion of stealing police documents, following their work on a documentary that alleged police collusion in the 1994 Loughinisland massacre in County Down. Those arrests had also been ruled unlawful, by Northern Ireland’s High Court in 2019, and the journalists awarded substantial damages.
Following the IPT’s ruling, Birney and McCaffrey called for a public enquiry to fully investigate the extent of unlawful police activity.
“This ruling marks a significant victory for press freedom, and it has exposed critical failures in both the monitoring and oversight of surveillance operations carried out against journalists and their sources,” McCaffrey said. “The police need to change: they should respect press freedom, they must abide by the rule of law and uphold the democratic principles of transparency and accountability.”
PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher said in a statement he would take time to reflect on the IPT’s judgment and that significant changes had already been made since the issues occurred. “I accept the Investigatory Powers Tribunal’s judgment that due consideration was not given to whether there was an overriding public interest in interfering with journalistic sources before authorising surveillance,” he said. “This was one of a number of difficult decisions on a complex and fast moving day for policing in Northern Ireland involving balancing competing interests at pace.”
The UK is ranked 23rd out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2024 World Press Freedom Index.
