The European Court of Human Rights and the Right to Privacy in the Workplace

摘要

In November I Chaired a panel on Data Rights and the Rule of Law at the Information Law and Policy Centre's Annual Conference at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. This got me thinking about data protection, privacy and the Rule of Law more generally for the purposes of this Editorial. It is therefore rather fortuitous that the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), in the recent case of Lopez Ribalda v Spain [2019] ECHR 752, has handed down an important judgment in relation to the surveillance of employees in the workplace, and their right to privacy pursuant to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights that, in my view, complements the Court's earlier decision in Barbulescu v Romania [2016] App. no. 61496/08.