tick-off from the human rights committee

In 2008, the UN Human Rights Committee, reporting on the compliance of the UK with its human rights obligations, focused on what it saw, rightly, as our particular vice: secrecy. The Official Secrets Act, it stated, has ‘been exercised to frustrate former employees of the Crown from bringing into the public domain issues of genuine public interest’. It recommends that state organisations should ensure that their ‘powers to protect information genuinely related to matters of national security are narrowly utilised’. Similarly, the special rapporteur considered that the rule of law here is endangered by a power shift towards intelligence agencies that acts ‘precisely to circumvent . . . necessary safeguards in a democratic society, abusing thereby the usually legitimate secrecy of intelligence operations’.