Britain warned over human rights violations

EUROPEAN UNION/BRITAIN

IN AN unusual warning, Europe’s top human rights organisation said yesterday that Britain’s reaction to the exposure of the United States’ vast surveillance programme had potentially troubling consequences for free expression.

Using language usually reserved for authoritarian holdouts in Eastern Europe or the Caucuses, the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe asked British authorities to explain why they or- dered the destruction of computer equipment held by The Guardian newspaper – the publication at the centre of the revelations – and the detention of a reporter’s partner at London’s Heathrow Airport.

‘‘These measures, if confirmed, may have a potentially chilling effect on journalists’ freedom of expression as guaranteed by . . . the European Convention on Human Rights,’’ Secretary-General Thorbjoern Jagland said in an open letter to British Home Secretary Theresa May.

Britain’s Home Office declined to comment on the letter yesterday.

The Council of Europe, a separate entity from the EU, runs the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the rights code signed by the council’s 47 member states.

The watchdog body regularly intervenes on human rights issues across the continent, but the language deployed in the letter was more familiar from council communications to countries with more shaky records on the rule of law.

Council spokesman Daniel Holtgen said the words ‘‘chilling effect’’ had previously been used in reference to situations in Turkey and Azerbaijan.

‘‘Rarely has there been the case that we’ve expressed concern over a Western state,’’ he said in a telephone interview. ‘‘The bottom line is we have to have the same standards.’’

Britain has been on the defensive since Sunday, when London police used anti-terrorism powers to detain David Miranda – the Brazilian partner of investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald – at Heathrow and seize disks and other electronic equipment carrying what his lawyers said was sensitive journalistic material.

Greenwald has been at the centre of The Guardian’s reporting on the US National Security Agency’s secret domestic espionage programme, and Miranda’s detention drew outrage from many who saw the incident as a clumsy attempt to put an end to an embarrassing series of scoops.

The next day, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger revealed that British spies had overseen the destruction of hard drives carrying the leaked material which has served as the basis for much of the paper’s reporting, sending intelligence agents into the newsroom’s basement to watch as the disks were smashed with angle grinders and drills.

Although Rusbridger said other copies of the leaks existed else- where and British officials defended the move as an attempt to keep the sensitive intelligence out of foreign hands, the image of spies overseeing the destruction of journalists’ hard drives rang alarm bells across Europe.

Holtgen posed a rhetorical question: What would have happened had a journalist’s partner been detained in Moscow, or if a Russian newspaper had had its hard drives smashed?

‘‘You would have the Western press all over Russia,’’ he said.