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LONDON Britains electronic spy agency was acting unlawfully until December when it received intelligence provided by the U.S. National Security Agency, a British court ruled Friday.

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a court that oversees the intelligence and security agencies, said that Britains spy agency, GCHQ, was violating human rights when it received the intercepted communications from the NSA because it had not made details of the procedure and its safeguards on it public. In the tribunals 15-year history, this is the first time it has ruled against any of Britains intelligence agencies.

The court also said that while the lack of transparency in the past meant that GCHQ had breached human rights, the agency has been in compliance with the law since December.

The ruling comes at a time of heated debate in Britain over the balance between security and privacy, with Prime Minister David Cameron vowing to push for legislation to beef up security agencies surveillance powers if his party wins the upcoming general election.

In its ruling, the court said that the regime governing the soliciting, receiving, storing and transmitting by UK authorities of private communications of individuals located in the UK by the NSA breached Articles 8 or 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, because GCHQs safeguards were kept secret. Article 8 refers to the right of privacy, while Article 10 covers freedom of expression.

In December, the tribunal said, the security agency made public the safeguards governing the exchanges with the NSAs Prism and Upstream mass surveillance programs, making the exchanges lawful. The safeguards were disclosed as part of a separate legal challenge brought by civil liberty groups.

GCHQ said that the legal frameworks around intelligence-sharing were compatible with the law and that Fridays ruling against it was, in essence, a technicality, or in one small respect in relation to the historic intelligence-sharing regime. It also said that the ruling did not require it to change its operations.

The NSA and other U.S. officials declined to comment.

A GCHQ spokesman also said: We are pleased that the court has once again ruled that the U.K.s bulk interception regime is fully lawful. He added, Todays IPT ruling re-affirms that the processes and safeguards within the intelligence-sharing regime were fully adequate at all times it is simply about the amount of detail about those processes and safeguards that needed to be in the public domain. We welcome the important role the IPT has played in ensuring that the public regime is sufficiently detailed.

The British government is committed to transparency, Britains Home Office said response to the ruling. We have now made public the detail of the safeguards that underpin requests to overseas governments for support on interc

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GCHQ-NSA intelligence sharing unlawful