Guidelines for Judicial Actors on Privacy and Data Protection

These guidelines seek to provide a general framework for judicial actors to assess matters of privacy and data protection in the face of other rights, such as freedom of expression and the right to privacy. It includes relevant case law from various national, international and regional bodies that may inform judicial actors’ understanding of the matters. It draws a coherent line from privacy rights to data protection rights and the challenges of upholding these rights in the face of new technologies.

The recommendations include, among others:

• The right to data protection has since been compared to the freedom of expression rights and, as such, any evaluation about it should consider its presence in ongoing trials, debates and documents and also its instrumental nature as an enabler of other related human rights, besides its gradual yet constant evolving presence in human rights documents and statutes.
• As information and communication technologies intensify the availability of information and its uses, the right to data protection and freedom of expression must more and more be mutually evaluated and considered. In this sense, cases which would be typically analyzed according to freedom of expression standards may also increasingly demand the consideration of the data protection rights potentially (or actually) involved —and vice-versa.