National Security

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National Security

CCLA rejects pitting security against human rights and civil liberties; rather, we believe that civil liberties and human rights are prerequisites for effective security and public safety, not impediments.

The ways national security agencies are allowed to operate, in Canada and around the world, affect us. The mandates our intelligence agencies are given, the way information is collected, the way that terrorist suspects and terrorist speech are defined, and the way those suspected of terrorist offences are treated before proven guilty, matters to ordinary people. It matters because it affects our right to privacy from intrusive state powers. It matters because it affects our rights to freedom of expression and protest. It matters because it affects our rights to due process under the law. And fundamentally, it matters because it affects the nature of our relationship as citizens and residents of Canada with the government, and within our democracy.

CCLA advocates for proportionate and rights-respecting national security legislation. We fight against mass surveillance and unconstrained information sharing. We persistently call for proper oversight and accountability for national security agencies, including the Canadian Border Service Agency. We call out racial profiling and stand up for the principles of fundamental justice in an area most remarkable for its secrecy.

Our Ongoing Case in the European Court of Human Rights

CCLA has been able to take the fight for human rights to the global scale.

CCLA is participating in this fight because we believe that laws that allow bulk collection of communications data impacts us all.

In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed the scope and reach of mass surveillance in the U.K. CCLA and our international colleagues worked together to challenge the UK by asking the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) to examine whether the British signals intelligence agency’s was intercepting emails to and from 10 rights and liberties organizations (including CCLA), and to determine whether this was lawful or a breach of the right to privacy.

CCLA and our partners were successful in this fight and in 2014, the IPT found that UK intelligence agencies had unlawfully spied on the communications of our international colleagues.

The tribunal also found that UK intelligence sharing with the US, which had been governed under a secret legal framework, was unlawful; however the IPT ruled that these practices may comply with the UK’s human rights obligations. We disagree that this kind of mass interception can ever comply with our human rights and so we launched a case to argue that position.

On September 13, 2018, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that UK laws enabling mass surveillance do in fact violate rights to privacy and freedom of expression.

The fact that it is now possible for the state to retain private information about the population of a whole nation (or even many nations) and that retaining such information may be operationally useful, does not justify the intrusion of doing so.

Our Work in National Security

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National Security