Transforming Breach of Confidence? Towards a Common Law Right of Privacy under the Human Rights Act

Bibliographic Data

ID9194261
AuthorsGavin Phillipson (0000-0002-9326-8983, Durham University, corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume66
Issue5
Pages726-758
Publication date2003-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueModern Law Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0026-7961 • E-ISSN: 1468-2230
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1468-2230.6605003
OpenAlexW2027872701
LanguageEN
Citations received5

This article examines the development of a remedy for unauthorised publication of personal information that has resulted from the fusion of breach of confidence with the limited ‘horizontal’ application of Article 8 of the ECHR via the Human Rights Act. Its analysis of Strasbourg and domestic post‐HRA case law reveals the extent to which confidence has in some areas been radically transformed into a privacy right in all but name; however it also seeks to expose the analytical and normative tensions that arise in the judgments between the values of confidentiality and privacy as overlapping but not coterminous concepts, due in part to the failure to resolve decisively the horizontal effect conundrum. This judicial ambivalence towards the reception of privacy as a legal right into English law may, it will argue, also be seen in the prevailing judicial approach to the resolution of the conflict between privacy and expression interests which, it will suggest, is both normatively and structurally inadequate

Ambivalence · Common law · Confidentiality · Human rights · Information privacy · Law and economics · Normative · Personally identifiable information · Political science · Privacy law · Privacy policy · Right to privacy · Sociology · The Right to Privacy · Criminal Law and Evidence · Freedom of Expression and Defamation · Law · Legal Rights and Human Rights · Psychology · Social Psychology

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