THE FACES OF SELF IN THE PUBLIC MIRROR
Which is the meaning of the right to own image of a person in the present day “image society”? How much is still private and how the legal protection is assured? How to keep the balance between the desire of privacy and the right to free information based on public (or private) interest? These are only few questions that I intend to answer from a human rights perspective.
European Court of Human Rights.
The applicant had been arrested in 1997 on suspicion of carrying out a number of armed robberies on mini-cab drivers. He agreed to participate in identification parades but failed to attend on the day on which they were due to take place. Instead he sent a doctor’s note stating that he was too ill to go to work. The parades were rearranged and notice to that effect was sent to the applicant’s home address. The applicant did not attend the rearranged parade, stating that he had not received notification as he had changed address. A further robbery then occurred for which the applicant was arrested. The applicant again agreed to stand on an identification parade, but again failed to attend on the day that it was to take place. Following this failure to attend two more robberies were committed with which the applicant was subsequently charged. The mainstay of the prosecution’s case against the applicant would be the ability of a number of witnesses to make visual identifications and for this reason submitting the applicant to an identification parade was of great importance. In light of the applicant’s failure to attend the parades that had been arranged, the police decided to arrange a video identification. Permission to film the applicant covertly for this purpose was sought from the Deputy Chief Constable under Home Office guidelines. The applicant was taken from prison, where he was being detained in relation to another matter, to a police station. Both the applicant and the prison authorities had been informed that this was for identification purposes and further interviews regarding the armed robberies. On arrival at the police station he was invited to participate in an identification parade but refused. The custody suite at the police station was fitted with a camera which was kept running at all times and covered an area in which police officers and other suspects came and went. Before the applicant arrived at the police station an engineer made adjustments to the camera to ensure that clear images were obtained that were suitable for use in a video identification. The footage of the applicant was then used in a compilation with footage of 11 other volunteers who imitated the actions of the applicant. Two of the witnesses who viewed the video compilation picked out the applicant. Neither the applicant nor his solicitor were informed that a tape had been made or used for identification purposes and were, therefore, not given an opportunity to view it prior to its use.
Privacy as an Aspect of Human Dignity : An Answer to Dean Prosser
Introduction Three-quarters of a century have passed since Warren and Brandeis published their germinal article, “The Right of Privacy.” In this period many hundreds of cases, ostensibly founded upon the right to privacy, have been decided, a number of statutes expressly embodying it have been enacted, and a sizeable scholarly literature has been devoted to it. Remarkably enough, however, there remains to this day considerable confusion concerning the nature of the interest which the right to privacy is designed to protect. The confusion is such that in 1956 a distinguished federal judge characterized the state of the law of privacy by likening it to a “haystack in a hurricane.” And, in 1960, the dean of tort scholars wrote a comprehensive article on the subject which, in effect, repudiates Warren and Brandeis by suggesting that privacy is not an independent value at all but rather a composite of the interests in reputation, emotional tranquility and intangible property. My purpose in this article is to propose a general theory of individual privacy which will reconcile the divergent strands of legal development—which will put the straws back into the haystack. The need for such a theory is pressing. In the first place, the disorder in the cases and commentary offends the primary canon of all science that a single general principle of explanation is to be preferred over a congeries of discrete rules.