Counter-terrorism efforts rob citizens of basic privacy rights, which undermines rather than improves security, a leading European human rights official said.

"In the war on terror, the notion of privacy has been altered," Swedish diplomat Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights, said in a report.

"General surveillance raises serious democratic problems which are not answered by the repeated assertion that those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear. This puts the onus in the wrong place: It should be for states to justify the interferences they seek to make on privacy rights," his report said.

Large numbers of innocent people have been subjected to "surveillance, harassment, discrimination, arrest or worse," Hammarberg's report said.

"This robs targeted individuals of fundamental safeguards, leads to alienation of the groups in question and thus actually undermines security," the report said.

The Council of Europe, founded in 1949, is the oldest international organization working toward European integration. It focuses on legal standards, human rights, democratic development, the rule of law and cultural cooperation among the 800 million citizens of its 47 member countries.