An environmental activist who was deceived into a two-year intimate relationship by an undercover police officer has been awarded £229,000 in compensation after winning a landmark legal case.
Kate Wilson won the compensation after a tribunal ruled in a scathing judgment that police had grossly violated her human rights in five ways.
She pursued a decade-long campaign to discover the truth about how she was deceived into the sexual relationship by the undercover officer, Mark Kennedy, who spent seven years infiltrating environmental groups.
Wilson’s relationship with Kennedy lasted between November 2003 and February 2005. Kennedy did not disclose to her that he was a police officer who had been sent to spy on her and the political groups she supported. She only discovered his real identity in 2010.
Kennedy was part of a covert police operation that spied on more than 1,000 predominantly leftwing and progressive political groups over more than four decades. Many undercover officers deceived women they were spying on into sexual relationships during their covert deployments. These relationships are known to have occurred between the 1970s and 2010.