Privacy as personal resistance: exploring legal narratology and the need for a legal architecture for personal privacy rights

Different cultures produce different privacies – both architecturally and legally speaking – as well as in their different legal architectures. The ‘Simms principle’ can be harnessed to produce semi-constitutional privacy protection through statute; building on the work already done in ‘bringing rights home’ through the Human Rights Act 1998. This article attempts to set out a notion of semi-entrenched legal rights, which will help to better portray the case for architectural, constitutional privacy, following an examination of the problems with a legal narrative for privacy rights as they currently exist. I will use parallel ideas from the works of W.B. Yeats and Costas Douzinas to explore and critique these assumptions and arguments. The ultimate object of this piece is an argument for the creation of a legal instrument, namely an Act of Parliament, in the United Kingdom; the purpose of which is to protect certain notions of personal privacy from politically-motivated erosion and intrusion

'Too well-travelled', not well-formed? the reform of 'criminality information sharing' in the UK

The UK Supreme Court will eventually have to pass judgment on the compliance of the legal and policy framework for ‘criminality information sharing’ with the stipulations of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and perhaps in relation to more than one area of practice within public protection work. Parliament should recognise that there is a groundswell of judicial (and academic) opinion which suggests that, if the current legal framework regulating the sharing of information for the purposes of public protection is lawful, even in the face of criticism from the European Court of Human Rights, then an intolerable level of uncertainty as to the issue of that legality has now been reached. This paper addresses the root causes of this legal uncertainty, and argues for statutory reform to revisit even recent tinkering with the law in this area. In an overview of both a body of common law, in the form of a series of key decisions from the courts, as well as the tensions between two tracts of legislation, promoting public protection and human rights values occasionally at odds with one another, this piece examines the crucial issue of the retention of criminality information and the idea of individual (offender) consultation over its use in public protection work. </jats:p