The Elusive Right to Privacy: Privacy Theory and Article 8 of the ECHR

Academics across the world, especially in the United States, have dedicated vast amounts of time and energy to studying privacy, etching out detailed theories of privacy, scrutinising it from a variety of perspectives, and weaving through disciplines, past, present and future trends, concerns and problems associated with the concept. British scholars, on the other hand, have traditionally taken a more doctrinal approach to the subject. Yet we can take those carefully crafted theoretical lenses, and peer through them to examine the right to privacy located in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Moreover, by doing so we can also examine the quality and suitability of these theoretical lenses against the backdrop of non-American privacy jurisprudence.

This book seeks to do this by analysing the following dimensions of privacy: scope, desirability, vulnerability, states, value, balance and remedy. The fruits of this analysis offer the first thematic account of the privacy protection afforded by Article 8 ECHR, and an external view on privacy theory.