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Title | Date added | Template | Body | Legal status | Document type | Year | Document code | Original document | Paragraph text | Thematics | Topic(s) | Person(s) affected | Year |
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Principles underpinning privacy and the protection of
personal data | Dec 11, 2023 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2022 | A/77/196 | ||||||
Privacy and personal data protection in Ibero-America: A
step towards globalization? | Dec 11, 2023 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2022 | A/HRC/49/55 | ||||||
Implementation of the principles of purpose limitation,
deletion of data and demonstrated or proactive
accountability in the processing of personal data collected by
public entities in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic | Dec 11, 2023 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2022 | A/HRC/52/37 | ||||||
Artificial intelligence and privacy, and children’s privacy | Dec 11, 2023 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2021 | A/HRC/46/37 | ||||||
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Dec 11, 2023 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2021 | A/76/220 | ||||||
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Dec 11, 2023 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2020 | A/HRC/43/52 | ||||||
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Dec 11, 2023 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2020 | A/75/147 | ||||||
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Dec 11, 2023 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2019 | A/HRC/40/63 | ||||||
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Dec 11, 2023 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2019 | A/HRC/40/63 | ||||||
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Dec 11, 2023 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2019 | A/HRC/40/63 | ||||||
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Dec 11, 2023 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2019 | A/74/277 | ||||||
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Dec 11, 2023 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2018 | A/73/438 | ||||||
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Dec 11, 2023 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2018 | A/HRC/37/62 | ||||||
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Dec 11, 2023 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2017 | A/HRC/34/60 | ||||||
Report of the Special Rapporteur of the Human Rights Council on the right to privacy | Dec 11, 2023 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2017 | A/72/540 | ||||||
First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 | Aug 19, 2019 | Document | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | 2016 | A/71/368 | ||||||
First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 29 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | Moves in this direction continue with the passage of the third reading of the Investigatory Powers Bill in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. The Bill is scheduled to continue to be considered at the Committee stage in the House of Lords in September 2016. The Special Rapporteur must assume that readers are also familiar with the criticism he made of the Bill in his report of 9 March 2016. The part of the Bill which deals with mass surveillance and bulk hacking continues to be under international scrutiny. The Court of Justice of the European Union is set to rule on the matter following an opinion expressed by the Advocate General of the Court, on 19 July 2016, that bulk processing is only legal in cases of serious crime, which is a far narrower use than that permissible under the Bill. The Bill remains a privacy minefield, a thorough analysis of which would require 10 times the 10,300 word limit that the present report must respect, but the battle is happily being valiantly fought by Ministers of Parliament, Liberty, the Law Society, the Open Rights Group and Privacy International. It can only be hoped that the Government of the United Kingdom presses the pause button, listens carefully to what both the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice have to say about surveillance and lets sanity prevail. It would also do well to listen to some members of its own House of Lords. Lord Paddick, a former senior police officer, has lambasted the Bill's provisions dealing with Internet connection records, saying: "Internet connection records - the only virgin territory in the Bill - are going to intrude into innocent people's privacy." He later argues that the catch-all nature of Internet connection records is disproportionate given the warrantless access the Bill affords to police of this personal data on all Internet users in the United Kingdom. |
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| 2016 | ||||
First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 30 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | Never mind that the Investigatory Powers Bill should never have been proposed in its current form nor advanced to approval by the House of Commons in the first place. The discussion in the House of Lords to date has not been encouraging. Earl Howe, Minister of State for Defence and Deputy Leader of the House of Lords, on 13 July 2016, said:
It may be entirely sensible for the government to work with [communication service providers] to determine whether it would be reasonably practicable to take steps to develop and maintain a technical capability to remove encryption that has been applied to communications or data.
Law enforcement and the intelligence agencies must retain the ability to require telecommunications operators to remove encryption in limited circumstances. |
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| 2016 | ||||
First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 40 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | The National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI) of Mexico issued a very interesting judgment (Expediente PPD.0050/16) on 13 July 2016, where we read that: "It is pertinent to note that although the right to the protection of personal data, in accordance with its constitutional regulation, is an autonomous right to the protection of private life, there should be a broader interpretation of both concepts, while the latter means a sphere where anyone can freely develop their personality." Therefore, in general, the protection of private life includes other rights and specific guarantees for the storage of information, access to personal data, as well as the regulation on protection of private communications, names, physical and moral integrity. |
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| 2016 | ||||
First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 37c | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [Furthermore, the draft German law raises a whole plethora of other concerns:] Independent oversight: the new law contains no adequate independent judicial oversight; |
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| 2016 | ||||
First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 22 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | Like many other fundamental human rights, privacy is a dynamic right, not a static right. An expectation of and a preference for privacy has existed for thousands of years, but this does not mean that the degree of protection of the right or the understanding of the boundaries of the right have remained unchanged as the direction has moved to greater protection. Privacy has developed over time, and much evidence has been identified prior to the creation of the Special Rapporteur mandate and the appointment of the incumbent which shows how the understanding of privacy and the exercise of the right has varied across the dimensions of "Time, Place and Space". Contrary to what some may think, recognizing this reality does nothing to undermine the existence of the right nor its universality. Instead, it makes one reflect about the complex set of values that underpin the right and the way that our understanding of the right needs to change as circumstances change in order for the underlying values to continue to be protected and indeed, as much as possible, have their protection increased. The advent and applications of new technologies such as the smartphone is one typical example of how we need to update our understanding of privacy. As United States Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito put it, in the landmark United States case of Riley v. California in 2014:
We should not mechanically apply the rule used in the predigital era to the search of a cell phone. Many cell phones now in use are capable of storing and accessing a quantity of information, some highly personal, that no person would ever have had on his person in hard-copy form.
In this, Alito is concurring with the majority opinion as expressed by Chief Justice John Roberts that:
Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans "the privacies of life". The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.
Needless to say, it is not just Americans who wittingly or unwittingly surrender "the privacies of life" to their cell phones. Indeed, every single person on earth who carries a smartphone has entrusted to their most used portable device the privacies of their life irrespective of their creed, colour, ethnic origin, gender, nationality or geographical location. Which is why many of the observations made in Riley v. California are also of global importance. The Special Rapporteur will here quote extensively from this United States case since it outlines some of the arguments which should be considered next in the overall context of the dispute between Apple and the FBI wherever such issues are raised across the globe. |
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| 2016 | ||||
First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 23 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | As outlined in Riley v. California: "Modern cell phones … are now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy."7 The Supreme Court Justices noted correctly that:
Cell phones differ in both a quantitative and a qualitative sense from other objects that might be kept on an arrestee's person. The term "cell phone" is itself misleading shorthand; many of these devices are in fact minicomputers that also happen to have the capacity to be used as a telephone. They could just as easily be called cameras, video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps, or newspapers. One of the most notable distinguishing features of modern cell phones is their immense storage capacity. Before cell phones, a search of a person was limited by physical realities and tended as a general matter to constitute only a narrow intrusion on privacy.
More than once the United States Supreme Court Justices note that:
Although the data stored on a cell phone is distinguished from physical records by quantity alone, certain types of data are also qualitatively different. An Internet search and browsing history, for example, can be found on an Internet-enabled phone and could reveal an individual's private interests or concerns - perhaps a search for certain symptoms of disease, coupled with frequent visits to WebMD. Data on a cell phone can also reveal where a person has been.
There is an element of pervasiveness that characterizes cell phones but not physical records. Prior to the digital age, people did not typically carry a cache of sensitive personal information with them as they went about their day. Now it is the person who is not carrying a cell phone, with all that it contains, who is the exception. According to one poll, nearly three-quarters of smartphone users report being within five feet of their phones most of the time, with 12% admitting that they even use their phones in the shower.
The ability of the smartphone to provide a very detailed and accurate profile of its user is likewise identified by the Justices: |
| 2016 | |||||
First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 24 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | Most important, perhaps, is the realization by the Justices of the United States Supreme Court that the contents of a cell phone are so large in quantity and intimately private in character that they go far beyond the level of privacy that would be intruded upon in a traditional search of one's home as protected by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution:
A cell phone search would typically expose to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house: A phone not only contains in digital form many sensitive records previously found in the home; it also contains a broad array of private information never found in a home in any form - unless the phone is.
In this way, the Justices of the United States Supreme Court showed how the new technology embodied by smartphones has been a game shifter and that at this moment in "Time" (2014), the "Place" (the United States - and the phone located in the United States) where the personal data was to be found had changed significantly to one where portability, quantity and quality of the personal information are capable of completely altering and intensifying the privacy dimension of the personal "Space". |
| 2016 | |||||
First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 33 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | Germany has, for decades, provided an excellent example in pioneering privacy protection in some areas. In April 2016, the Constitutional Court of Germany kept true to this tradition when it ruled that parts of a law ("BKA-Gesetz") granting surveillance powers to federal police were unconstitutional because they did not have sufficient safeguards to ensure a balance between the rights of the individual to privacy and the interests of the State in investigating potential crime. Certain powers, such as the ability to conduct surveillance through recorded conversations or photographs, to carry out wiretaps or to remotely search computers, did not have adequate restrictions, including the possibility of judicial review, to guarantee that intrusions on the privacy of German citizens would be justified and proportionate, the court found. |
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| 2016 | ||||
First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 41 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | In the first full year of office, the Special Rapporteur has visited 14 countries during 20 trips undertaken for the mandate holder's business. These have included visits to countries as geographically far apart as Australia, Brazil, New Zealand and the United States, as well as 10 European States. Although technically speaking these were "informal" country visits, on many occasions they included the full array of engagements carried out during traditional official visits of the Special Rapporteur, including meetings with ministers, ministry officials, intelligence services, oversight agencies, data protection commissioners, law enforcement, civil society and leading corporations. In an overwhelming number of cases, the Special Rapporteur was received in a very positive manner. The next 12 months will also include at least two and possibly three official country visits, all tentatively scheduled, one each on three different continents (Africa, Asia and Latin America). |
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| 2016 | ||||
First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 37a | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [Furthermore, the draft German law raises a whole plethora of other concerns:] Purpose specification: the conditions for the collection and processing of data are vague and too broad; |
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| 2016 | ||||
First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 25 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | The United States Supreme Court Justices in Riley v. California were primarily concerned with outlawing warrantless searches of smartphones in terms of privacy considerations inherent in the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is relevant to point out, however, that the situation regarding cell phone security and encryption may be significantly more complex than one solely revolving around arguments of privacy and security. It may only be a matter of time before the United States Supreme Court Justices are faced with the same dilemma that would face the scores of countries around the world which have recognized the right to silence or the right to avoid self-incrimination as one of the standards of decency that a democratic society subscribes to. This is because the very characteristics of a mobile phone which make it such a special repository of personal data, as outlined in Riley v. California, also make it the most obvious tool which could totally and effectively undermine the right to silence, which has been gradually recognized in various jurisdictions since the sixteenth century and which in the United States is recognized as the Fifth Amendment. Put simply, in many jurisdictions around the world - but not all - an accused person has the right to avoid self-incrimination by remaining silent during criminal proceedings against him or her. There are very few exceptions to or qualifications of this right in places as far apart as Australia, Bangladesh, Germany, India, New Zealand, the United States … the list goes on. Yet a judicial warrant to access data held on a phone could effectively breach that right. The accused - hitherto not a compellable witness - may have the right to remain silent, but his or her phone could speak volumes about the most private of his or her thoughts, interests and actions. The accused's spouse or close family may equally be afforded the same status of not being a compellable witness in many jurisdictions. Yet most people would claim that their smartphone knows much more about them than their spouses, so is the smartphone to remain a compellable witness even with a judicial warrant required to access it? So where should logic - and logical consistency - lead us to? |
| 2016 | |||||
First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 32 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | Some members of the House of Lords do understand the issue perfectly. Lord Strasburger put it quite succinctly:
One feature of end-to-end encryption is that the provider cannot break it; encryption is private between the users at both ends. [Earl Howe] seems to be implying that providers can use only encryption which can be broken and therefore cannot be end to end, so the next version of the Apple iPhone would in theory become illegal. I think that there is quite a lot of work to be done on this.
The Special Rapporteur thinks so too, and would suggest that much of the work that needs to be done lies in the direction of moving the Government of the United Kingdom away from the illusion that it can effectively outlaw end-to-end encryption or make it unavailable to persons inside the United Kingdom. This proposal is on the same level of illogical thinking as trying to ban knives altogether because they could occasionally be used for harm, or to ban cars because they are sometimes used as getaway vehicles. Moreover, the security risks introduced by deliberately weakened encryption are vastly disproportionate to the gains. Strasburger summarized:
I want to emphasise - and anybody in the cryptography industry will spell this out - that you cannot have it both ways. Either encryption is secure, or it is not; it cannot be insecure for a small group of users and secure for everybody else.
Lord Paddick pointed to an approach which would be more consistent with the case law of the European Court of Human Rights as last expressed in Zakharov v. Russia: "Instead of the power to force a company to remove encryption from a whole service or technology, alternative and more targeted powers should be used instead."9 The Special Rapporteur can, at the present stage, only wonder when common sense - never mind a deserved respect for fundamental human rights like privacy - will finally prevail in the State's debate on the subject. |
| 2016 | |||||
First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 43 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | Furthermore, the Special Rapporteur has created structures for further investigation and consultation by setting up five Working Parties, one each for the Thematic Action Streams identified in the first set of five priorities: Big Data and Open Data; Security and Surveillance; Health Data; Personal data processed by corporations; and "A better understanding of Privacy". These will provide the basis for thematic reports, which are expected to start being presented in 2017-2018. This methodology has permitted the Special Rapporteur to partly overcome resource constraints by tapping into a global pool of experts prepared to provide their domain expertise on an unpaid volunteer basis. The Special Rapporteur will, however, continue to seek extramural funding and welcomes all forms of assistance to carry out his mandate properly. |
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| 2016 | ||||
First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 45 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | While broadly satisfied with the collaboration to date, the Special Rapporteur recommends that more governments engage with the mandate and, as other governments have done during the first year of activity, come forward to consult on draft privacy laws and related areas such as surveillance when these are still at an early stage. Furthermore, the Special Rapporteur strongly encourages and appreciates participation in, and facilitation of, initiatives organized by the mandate holder, such as IIOF2016 or informal country visits or various workshop conferences. |
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| 2016 |