Notification, an important safeguard against the improper use of surveillance – finally recognized in case law and EU law
Abstract
According to the European Court of Human Rights, the notification of individuals of surveillance measures is both an essential safeguard against the abuse of monitoring powers and an important part of the right to an effective remedy before the courts. However, the right of an individual to be informed that the police or the secret service is collecting data about them, or that particular surveillance measures have been carried out (telephone tapping, visual or video surveillance, covert installation of monitoring software on a computer etc.) is not harmonised in the EU. National regulatory controls in this area thus vary between Member States and there is a lack of regulatory cohesion at the EU level. This article analyses the current provisions within both the EU and Council of Europe regulatory frameworks concerning notification requirements after data have been collected and after surveillance has been carried out. It also examines future regulation in this field including the EU Commission’s proposals to revise the current Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and the Framework Decision 2008/977/EC for data processing concerning police and judicial co-operation.Downloads
Additional Files
Published
Issue
Section
License
EJLT is an open access journal, aiming to disseminate academic work and perspectives as widely as possible to the benefit of the author and the author’s readers. It is the assumption of the EJLT that authors who publish in the journal wish their work to be available as freely and as widely as possible through the open access publishing channel.
Authors who publish with EJLT will retain copyright and moral rights in the underlying work but will grant all users the rights to copy, store and print for non-commercial use copies of their work. Commercial mirroring may also be carried out with the consent of the journal. The work must remain as published – without redaction or editing – and must clearly state the identity of the author and the originating EJLT url of the article. Any commercial use of the author’s work - apart from mirroring - requires the permission of the author and any aspects of the article which are the property of EJLT (e.g. typographical format) requires permission from EJLT.
Authors can sometimes become no longer contactable (through, for example, death or retirement). If this occurs, any rights in the work will pass to the European Journal of Law and Technology which will continue to make the work available in as wide a manner as possible to achieve the aims of open access and ensuring that an author's work continues to be available. An author - or their estate - can recover these rights from EJLT by providing contact information.
The European Journal of Law and Technology holds rights in format, publication and dissemination.
EJLT, as a non-commercial organisation - which receives donations to allow it to continue publishing – must retain information on reader access to journal articles. This means that we will not give permission to mirror the journal unless we can be provided with full details as to reader access to each and every journal article. We prefer and encourage deep linking rather than mirroring. Encouragement is thus given for all users – commercial and non-commercial – to provide indexes and links to articles in the EJLT where the index or link points to the location of the article on the EJLT server, rather than to stored copies on other servers.
Please contact the European Journal of Law and Technology if you are in any doubt as to what this statement of use covers.