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Content type: News & Analysis
The Aspen Card - the debit payment card given to asylum seekers that PI has previously exposed as a de facto surveillance tool - will be outsourced to a new company. The contract with Sodexo has come to an end and the company Prepaid Financial Services will be taking over.
Our campaign for transparency in relation to the Aspen Card and how it monitors asylum seekers continues. Not only do we demand clarity from the Home Office [read more here], we believe the new provider, Prepaid Financial…
Content type: News & Analysis
In the last few weeks, the UK government has announced various new measures to ensure that crossings across the Channel were “inviable” including by appointing a new role of “clandestine Channel threat commander" and further plans to deploy the navy to stop migrants from crossing to the UK from France across the Channel. Premature plans it seems, as not only would such measures be contrary to the UK’s international obligations to allow individuals to seek asylum in the UK, but also since such…
Content type: News & Analysis
Today Advocate General (AG) Campos Sánchez-Bordona of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), issued his opinions (C-623/17, C-511/18 and C-512/18 and C-520/18) on how he believes the Court should rule on vital questions relating to the conditions under which security and intelligence agencies in the UK, France and Belgium could have access to communications data retained by telecommunications providers.
The AG addressed two major questions:
(1) When states seek to impose…
Content type: Long Read
*Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash
The British government needs to provide assurances that MI5’s secret policy does not authorise people to commit serious human rights violations or cover up of such crimes
Privacy International, along Reprieve, the Committee on the Administration of Justice, and the Pat Finucane Centre, is challenging the secret policy of MI5 to authorise or enable its so called “agents” (not MI5 officials) to commit crimes here in the UK.
So far we have discovered…
Content type: Long Read
(In order to click the hyperlinks in the explainer below, please download the pdf version at the bottom of the page).
Content type: Long Read
(In order to click the hyperlinks in the explainer below, please download the pdf version at the bottom of the page).
Content type: News & Analysis
Political activist and university lecturer Tadesse Kersmo believed that he was free from intrusive surveillance when he was granted political asylum in the UK. Instead, he was likely subject to more surveillance than ever. His case underlines the borderless nature of advanced surveillance technologies and why it represents such a massive problem.
In the past, those fleeing conflict or persecution could reasonably expect a degree of respite if they managed to escape their circumstances.…