Horizontal Rights, the Human Rights Act and Privacy: Lessons from the Commonwealth?

Abstract

Protection of privacy is one of the areas most often claimed as having the potential for significant development as a result of incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights (“the Convention”). As is well known, English law lacks a general remedy for infringement of privacyper se: although the courts have lamented the lack of protection for private individuals (notably from the press), they have hitherto left it to Parliament to intervene. After flirtation with introducing either a specific statutory code applicable to intrusive journalistic activities or a general statutory tort of infringement of privacy, the Conservative government abandoned the idea altogether.1Perhaps because of the lack of legislative concern (politicians, after all, have reasons of strong self-interest not to provoke the press), the judiciary has expressed renewed interest, at least through extra-judicial pronouncements2and broad hints in one recent House of Lords decision that the time for reconsideration may be fast approaching.3

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 79 citations exist upstream.