Comparing Privacy Law in Two Jurisdictions - Advice needed!

dee8839

Hi there,

I have to do an essay on privacy law or defamation as part of my LLM. Unfortunately, the fact that an essay is due is about all the narrowing down the lecturer has done on the subject, its totally up to me how to approach it.:eek:

Its a comparative civil obligations course, so I've been thinking of comparing the privacy law in two jurisdictions. I was thinking of doing it on Germany v England, or USA v England.

Would anyone have any better ideas of which jurisdictions I could compare, thinking in terms of availability of info on the subject? Or would I be better off choosing defamation?

Any thoughts appreciated, thanks in advance.

Tom Young

Privacy is a nice topic in re. comparisons. See here: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055088178&highlight=Hannover

Now that is only a link to a few cases etc. I'd look carefully at the context in which you are going to approach it though if taking privacy. I would do UK v Ireland. Look at Wainright v UK etc and the ECHR Act versus Ireland, the case in the above link are of use and there was a case last week in the UK entitled RST v UVW [2009] EWHC B24 (QB), 11 September 2009 The UK High Court has granted an interim injunction, based on a claim to protect privacy, to prevent disclosure of information about sexual encounters for payment between the applicant (who had some public reputation) and a woman. The woman had subsequently entered into a confidentiality agreement with the applicant regarding the encounters. Tugendhat J noted that the application concerned material which might be defamatory. According to defamation law, no interlocutory injunction would be granted where a defendant was proposing to publish material which he alleged to be true (Bonnard v Perryman [1891] 2 Ch 269). This raised an issue of principle as to whether or not the rule applied in this case, even though the case was advanced in privacy. The applicant argued, among other things, that even if the rule would otherwise apply, the confidentiality agreement overrode it. The judge granting the interim injunction said that, at some point, the court would have to grapple with the question of whether the rule applied when an application was made on the basis of privacy to restrain publication of arguably defamatory material. The case illustrates the potential for privacy law to be used to restrain publication of material which may be defamatory.

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2009/B24.html

Best we have is Herrity v APN, per Dunne J. which is statutory based and not based on an ECHR Act which as you know is not in force properly in Ireland.

Defamation would be easy also.

Tom

Aprilsunshine

France has very interesting privacy laws but you would probably need to speak French to trawl though the cases/articles.