While we're on the subject...
... of comparative law in different countries...
The UK Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, is reported to favour a change
to UK legislation so as to allow the use of phone tap evidence in
court.
There are some interesting dimensions to the argument, not least that
civil liberties groups apparently favour the move, because it increases
the transparency of the evidence-gathering process by law enforcers.
Apparently the security services have reservations on exactly the same
grounds...
That aspect aside, I tend towards unease when such a policy change is
'sold' to us on the basis that it works elsewhere. In the case of the
United States, for instance, it seems to me that there are significant
legislative and constitutional differences which such a high-level
comparison glibly skates over. For instance, the UK and US have
different legislation relating to the prosecution of 'serious and
organised crime' and 'racketeering' respectively; there are different
rights in the two countries, enshrined in very different ways (I'm
thinking, for instance, of the uses to which the First and Fifth
amendments have frequently been put in legal defence).
I'm not saying the admissibility of phone-tap evidence is necessarily a
good or bad thing (yet...); I just think there needs to be a greater
acknowledgement of the fact that, by the time either US or UK law
enforcers actually get a gangland boss to trial, the legal and
enforcement paths by which they reach that point are currently very
different in many respects. Superficial claims of equivalence should be
very carefully examined.
Posted by racingsnake
@ 01:28 PM GMT+00:00
EU Data Protection Supervisor on privacy
Peter Hustinx, the EU Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) appears to
recognise the need for a balance between privacy, legislation and good
practice. It seems clear to me that if legislation contains no basis
for the protection of personal data, privacy becomes all but impossible
to safeguard. On the other hand, as I've noted before, different
countries do things different ways, so the balance between 'enabling
legislation' (in the sense of 'legislation which enables other measures
to be used') and self-regulating best practice (such as industry codes
of conduct) will need to vary from one place to another, even where
there is a common data protection directive - as in the European Union.
However, what Mr Hustinx doesn't say explicitly (at least, according to
the quotations in
this article)
is that all the EU legislation I'm
aware of in this area contains data protection exemptions for law
enforcement access. In that context, I think it's right that the EDPS
should be reminding governments and public sector institutions that
those exemptions must be counterbalanced by greater openness in the
other processing of citizens' data. As the article puts it:
"According to the EDPS, data about European citizens will be used
increasingly as governments seek to thwart terrorist activity. The EDPS
has warned that institutions are not informing citizens about how and
why their data is being processed and, as a result, they are unable to
exercise their rights properly."
'Informed consent' being, I think, a key right in this instance.
Posted by racingsnake
@ 12:55 PM GMT+00:00
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