E-mail,the Police,and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: Retooling Our Understanding of a Reasonable Expectation of Privacy in the Cyber Age

As in other jurisdictions, technological innovation continues to impose burdens on our understanding of the reasonable expectation of privacy in Canada. Recently, the Alberta Court of Queen's Bench was forced to weigh the privacy rights guaranteed under section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms against Her Majesty's interest in collecting electronic evidence (in order to facilitate criminal proceedings against an individual who was accused of using e-mail to gain possession of child pornography). For the first time ever in Canada, the Court's analysis focused specifically on the technological aspects of e-mail. Although technological enthusiasts applaud this approach, it has resulted in a decision which, if followed, is sure to render ineffectual the ability of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect the privacy of Canadian e-mail users against overly intrusive police wire-tap interceptions. Upon a detailed review of this decision (within the context of an overview of the Canadian jurisprudence on unreasonable search and seizure), the author of this paper argues that the traditional test for sanctioning privacy protection must shift away from a merely technological analysis of the actual security offered by the communications medium in question. The author submits that the proper analysis should focus instead on the reasonable Canadian e-mail user's typical understanding and perception of the medium.     

Workplace Monitoring and the Right to Private Life at Work

In Barbulescu v Romania, the European Court of Human Rights clarified the application of the Article 8 right to private life in the workplace, and the extent of the state's positive obligations to protect the right against workplace monitoring. The decision establishes that there is an irreducible core to the right to private life at work that does not depend on an employee's reasonable expectations of privacy, and sets out clear principles for striking a fair balance between Article 8 and the employer's interests in the context of workplace monitoring. This article considers the nature of states’ positive obligation to protect human rights at work, the scope of the right to private life, and the impact of the decision on domestic law of unfair dismissal.     

Google liability for misleading or deceptive conduct: Australian perspective

On 6 of February 2013, the Australian High Court handed down an important decision in respect of the Google Inc's (Google) appeal against the decision of the Full Federal Court of Australia, holding that Google a search engine operator was not liable under s 52 of the Trade Practices Act (TPA) 1974 (Cth) for misleading or deceptive conduct (in respect of misleading advertisements published using Google's online ‘AdWords program’). The decision of the High Court is of great significance for jurisprudence on misleading and deceptive conduct with its broad implications for search engine providers such as Google, advertisers and trademark owners.     

Challenging statutory limitations on children's education rights: a re-examination of the Canadian Supreme Court Decision in Auton

The 2004 Supreme Court of Canada decision in Auton concerns the right of autistic children to access services held by their parents to be essential to their children's ability to participate as members of a democratic society. It is argued that the child's right to have his or her basic developmental needs met is a constitutionally protected one. Having those developmental needs met engages both education and health rights. In Auton the parents had sought funding for the service at issue from the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Children and Families (which dealt with mental health services and other particular support programs for the families of disabled children) as well as from the Ministry of Education. The case raises central questions regarding the very nature of education and the constitutionality of a discretionary power of government to set out statutory limitations upon fundamental human rights including education rights.     

A New Chapter in the Normalisation of Closed Material Procedures

This note provides an analysis of the Supreme Court decision in Haralambous, which authorised the use of closed material procedures (CMPs) in proceedings surrounding search and seizure warrants issued under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE). After presenting the facts of the case and the reasoning of the Court, the note examines the decision as an instance of CMP normalisation consistent with the model of normalisation argued for by Eva Nanopoulos in a previous MLR article. The notes goes on to make the case that Haralambous may be distinguished from previous instances of CMP normalisation on account of the Supreme Court's more open acceptance of CMPs in the decision, which signals a new chapter in CMP normalisation in the UK.     

Rules for Rights: European Law,Health Care and Social Citizenship

Social citizenship is about equality. The obvious problem for European social citizenship in a very diverse Union is that Member States will not be able or willing to bear the cost of establishing equal rights to health care and similar aspects of social citizenship. Health care is a particularly good case of this tension between EU citizenship and Member State diversity. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) strengthened the right to health care in other Member States, but this cannot create an equal right to health care when Member States are so different. In its efforts to balance a European right, the Court has formulated ‘rules for rights’—not so much European social citizenship rights, as a set of legal principles by which it judges the decisions of the Member States.     

An Incomplete Victory: The Implications of QT v Director of Immigration for the Protection of Gay Rights in Hong Kong

QT v Director of Immigration is the most important decision on gay rights in Hong Kong since the unequal ages of consent between heterosexuals and homosexuals were held to be unconstitutional 10 years ago. The Court of Appeal of Hong Kong affirmed the right of same‐sex couples married or in a civil partnership overseas to be treated on an equal basis with married heterosexual couples. This note considers the strengths and shortcomings of the Court of Appeal's reasoning, in terms of its potential significance both to the rights of sexual minorities and to the wider protection of human rights by means of the common law.     

‘Private jurisprudence’ and the right to be forgotten balancing test

Upon receipt of a right to be forgotten request, private actors like Google are responsible for implementing the balancing test between competing rights of privacy and data protection and free expression and access to information. This amounts to private jurisprudence that data subjects, lawyers, and interested parties could, theoretically, game to their advantage. This paper critiques this process and argues two separate, but related points. (1) Search engines have become the sole arbiter of the rights to privacy and data protection under Articles 7 and of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, when safeguarding should be a responsibility of state authorities. (2) As private actors face litigation if their decision is not acceptable to the data subject, the right to access information and the public's right to know is compromised. Search engines exert considerable power over access to and Internet usage, yet nevertheless benefit from frameworks that permit a lack of adherence to similar human rights standards as public actors or agencies. As such, empowering search engines as decision-makers over conflicting fundamental rights is problematic. Rather than allow the content of the right to be forgotten to be fleshed out by private actors, the significant body of existing jurisprudence should form the basis for public guidelines on how to implement the right to be forgotten. An analysis of case law of national courts, the European Court of Human Rights and the CJEU reveals two related matters: it is possible to reverse engineer how search engines determine which requests will be actioned and those which will be denied. This paper argues a) collectively the body of jurisprudence is of sufficient standing to develop a public and transparent balancing test that is fair to all stakeholders and b) private actors should no longer be resolving the conflict between competing fundamental rights. The paper closes by positing a framework, loosely based on ICANN's Uniform Domain Resolution Procedure for resolving conflict between conflicting cyber property rights that provides transparency and accountability to the right to be forgotten and removes search engines as arbiters of the balancing test in select cases.     

NGOs,international courts,and state backlash against human rights accountability: Evidence from NGO mobilization against Tanzania at the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights

When nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) encounter state resistance to human rights accountability, how do NGOs use international courts for their human rights advocacy strategies? Considering the overlapping phenomena of shrinking civic space within authoritarian, hybrid, and democratically backsliding regimes, and state backlash against international courts, NGOs navigate two potential levels of state backlash against human rights accountability. Building on the interdisciplinary scholarship on legal mobilization, we develop an integrated framework for explaining how states' two-level (domestic and international) backlash tactics can both promote and deter NGOs' strategic litigation at international human rights courts (IHRCs). States' backlash tactics can influence NGOs' opportunities, capacities, and goals for their human rights advocacy, and thus affect whether and how they pursue strategic litigation at IHRCs. We elucidate the value of this framework through case studies of NGOs' litigation against Tanzania at the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, an understudied IHRC. Drawing on an original data set, interviews, and documentation, we process-trace how Tanzania's various backlash tactics influenced whether and how NGOs litigated at the Court. Our framework and analysis show how state backlash against human rights accountability affects NGOs' mobilization at IHRCs and, relatedly, IHRCs' opportunities for influence.     

The War of the Booksellers: Natural Law,Equity, and Literary Property in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

This article analyses the case of Hinton v Donaldson (1773) in which the judges of the Scottish Court of Session refused to follow their English brethren in recognizing an author's right of property outside the Statute of Anne (1710). The decision must be understood against the background of distinct notions of common law and equity in Scots law, drawn from the Natural law tradition of the European jus commune. At the same time the decision reveals developing strands of Enlightenment thought and concepts of the judicial role in relation to legislation.     

ECJ clarifies collecting societies' rights in relation to the cable retransmission right, but leaves questions unanswered

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has held that Article 9(2)of Directive 93/83 is to be interpreted as meaning that wherea collecting society is deemed to be mandated to manage therights of a copyright owner or holder of related rights whohas not transferred the management of his rights to a collectingsociety that society has the power to exercise that right holder'sright to grant or refuse authorization to a cable operator forcable retransmission and, consequently, its mandate is not limitedto management of the pecuniary aspects of those rights.     

Constitutionalising an Overlapping Consensus: The ECJ and the Emergence of a Coordinate Constitutional Order

The European Court of Justice's (ECJ's) jurisprudence of fundamental rights in cases such as Schmidberger and Omega extends the court's jurisdiction in ways that compete with that of Member States in matters of visceral concern. And just as the Member States require a guarantee that the ECJ respect fundamental rights rooted in national tradition, so the ECJ insists that international organisations respect rights constitutive of the EU. The demand of such guarantees reproduces between the ECJ and the international order the kinds of conflicting jurisdictional claims that have shadowed the relation between the ECJ and the courts of the Member States. This article argues that the clash of jurisdiction is being resolved by the formation of a novel order of coordinate constitutionalism in which Member States, the ECJ, the European Court of Human Rights and other international tribunals or organisations agree to defer to one another's decisions, provided those decisions respect mutually agreed essentials. This coordinate order extends constitutionalism beyond its home territory in the nation state through a jurisprudence of mutual monitoring and peer review that carefully builds on national constitutional traditions, but does not create a new, encompassing sovereign entity. The doctrinal instruments by which the plural constitutional orders are, in this way, profoundly linked without being integrated are variants of the familiar Solange principles of the German Constitutional Court, by which each legal order accepts the decisions of the others, even if another decision would have been more consistent with the national constitution tradition, ‘so long as’ those decisions do not systematically violate its own understanding of constitutional essentials. The article presents the coordinate constitutional order being created by this broad application of the Solange doctrine as an instance, and practical development, of what Rawls called an overlapping consensus: agreement on fundamental commitments of principle—those essentials which each order requires the others to respect—does not rest on mutual agreement on any single, comprehensive moral doctrine embracing ideas of human dignity, individuality or the like. It is precisely because the actors of each order acknowledge these persistent differences, and their continuing influence on the interpretation of shared commitments in particular conflicts, that they reserve the right to interpret essential principles, within broad and shared limits, and accord this right to others. The embrace of variants of the Solange principles by many coordinate courts, in obligating each to monitor the others' respect for essentials, creates an institutional mechanism for articulating and adjusting the practical meaning of the overlapping consensus.     

Student privacy rights involving strip searches

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution provides protection of all citizens against unreasonable search and seizure. The US Supreme Court has affirmed that the basic purpose of the Fourth Amendment is to safeguard the privacy and security of individuals against unreasonable intrusive searches by governmental officials. Since students possess constitutional rights and public school officials are considered governmental officials for Fourth Amendment purposes, privacy protection is afforded students in public schools within reasonable limits. A reasonable search is one that clearly does not violate the constitutional rights of students. What is reasonable, however, depends on the context within which a search occurs. Strip searches involving students in public schools are the most intrusive form of all searches. Extreme caution should be exercised by school officials regarding these types of searches.     

Citizen Led Policing in the Digital Realm: Paedophile Hunters and Article 8 in the case of Sutherland v Her Majesty's Advocate

In Sutherland v Her Majesty's Advocate, the Supreme Court unanimously dismissed an appeal which argued that the use of communications obtained by a paedophile hunter group as evidence in criminal prosecution was a violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The case raises fundamental questions of the scope of the right to private life as regards to the content of communications and the role played by private actors in the criminal justice process. This note argues that by limiting the protection of Article 8 to private communications which satisfy a contents-based test, the Court has bypassed the Article 8(2) balancing test to the detriment of the due process rights of the accused. The note concludes that the decision opens up the prospect of the state circumventing the accused's Article 8 privacy rights by lending tacit approval to the proactive investigations of these private ‘paedophile hunter’ groups.     

All Bark and No Bite: Notes on the Federal Constitutional Court's 'Banana Decision'

The Federal Constitutional Court's banana decision of 7 June 2000 continues the complex theme of national fundamental‐rights control over Community law. Whereas in the ‘Solange II’ decision (BVerfGE 73, 339) the Federal Constitutional Court had lowered its standard of review to the general guarantee of the constitutionally mandatorily required minimum, the Maastricht judgment (BVerfGE 89, 155) had raised doubts as to the continued validity of this case law. In the banana decision, which was based on the submission of the EC banana market regulation by the Frankfurt‐am‐Main administrative court for constitutional review, the Federal Constitutional Court has now confirmed the ‘Solange II’decision and restrictively specified the admissibility conditions for constitutional review of Community law as follows. Constitutional complaints and judicial applications for review of European legislation alleging fundamental‐rights infringements are inadmissible unless they show that the development of European law including Court of Justice case law has since the ‘Solange II’ decision generally fallen below the mandatorily required fundamental‐rights standard of the Basic Law in a given field. This would require a comprehensive comparison of European and national fundamental‐rights protection. This paper criticises this formula as being logically problematic and scarcely compatible with the Basic Law. Starting from the position that national constitutional courts active even in European matters should be among the essential vertical ‘checks and balances’ in the European multi‐level system, a practical alternative to the Federal Constitutional Court's retreat is developed. This involves at the first stage a submission by the Federal Constitutional Court to the Court of Justice, something that in the banana case might have taken up questions on the method of fundamental‐rights review and the internal Community effect of WTO dispute settlement decisions. Should national constitutional identity not be upheld even by this, then at a second stage, as ultima ratio taking recourse to general international law, the call is made for the decision of constitutional conflicts by an independent mediating body.     

Lawyers' Perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court: Is the Court a “Political” Institution?

Do legal elites—lawyers admitted to federal appellate bars—perceive the Supreme Court as a “political” institution? Legal elites differentiate themselves from the mass public in the amount and sources of information about the Court. They also hold near‐universal perceptions of Court legitimacy, a result we use to derive competing theoretical expectations regarding the impact of ideological disagreement on various Court perceptions. Survey data show that many legal elites perceive the Court as political in its decision making, while a minority perceive the Court as activist and influenced by external political forces. Ideological disagreement with the Court's outputs significantly elevates political perceptions of decision making, while it exhibits a null and moderate impact on perceptions of activism and external political influence, respectively. To justify negative affect derived from ideological disagreement, elites highlight the political aspects of the Court's decision making rather than engage in “global delegitimization” of the institution itself.     

Judges as Readers,Authors and Dialecticians: Legal Interpretation in the EC<Emphasis Type="Italic">t</Emphasis>HR Cases on Mental Disability

The wording of major human rights texts—constitutions and international treaties—is very similar in those provisions, which guarantee everyone the right to family, privacy, protection against discrimination and arbitrary detention, and the right to access the court. However, judges of lower national courts, constitutional judges and judges of the European Court of Human Rights often read the same or seemingly the same texts differently. This difference in interpretation gives rise not only to disputes about the hierarchy of interpretative authorities, but to more general disputes about limits of judicial construction and validity of legal arguments. How it may happen, that the national courts, which apply constitutional provisions or provisions of national legislative acts, which are seemingly in compliance with the international human rights standards, come to different results with the international judges? Do they employ different interpretative techniques, share different values or develop different legal concepts? Do international judges ‘write’ rather than ‘read’ the text of the Convention? Who is, in Plato’s terms, a name-giver and who has a power to define the ‘correctness’ of names? The answers to these questions from the rhetorical and semiotic perspectives are exemplified by the texts of the judicial decisions on the rights of persons with mental disabilities.     

An Improved Protection for the (Mentally Ill) Trans Parent: A Queer Reading of AP,Garçon and Nicot v France

The European Court of Human Rights has been deciding cases concerning LGBT rights since the early 1980s. Its case law on trans rights has changed drastically over time, imposing upon the states of the Council of Europe certain minimum standards regarding the legal recognition of gender identity. In its recent judgment of April 2017 the Court laid down a new rule to be adopted by domestic legislation; namely, that the legal recognition of gender transition cannot be made conditional upon pursuing medical or surgical procedures which have (or are likely to have) sterilising effects. This article analyses the judgment from a critical perspective grounded in queer theory, noting both the positive and the negative elements of the Court's decision.     

非法发行链上的侵权所得赔偿

在合法利用他人作品的情形,著作权人只能要求发行链第一个环节的发行人支付报酬,而在非法利用他人作品的情形,著作权人却可以同时要求发行链所有环节的侵权人赔偿各自的侵权所得。判断赔偿是否超额不应当以权利人在合法发行链上能够收取的报酬为准,而应当以被侵权人所遭受的损害为准,只有超出损害的赔偿,才构成超额赔偿。被侵权人以与侵权人同样的方式利用作品所能够获得的利润就是以特殊方法计算出来的损害。允许权利人获得非法发行链各环节的全部侵权所得并不构成超额赔偿。在计算上游侵权人应当赔偿的侵权所得时,不应当扣除下游侵权人已经支付的赔偿金。利用发行权一次用尽或者连带责任的原理将赔偿义务人的范围限定在非法发行链某一个环节的做法不值得借鉴。     

International human rights and the collegiation of journalists: The case of Costa Rica

This article examines the controversial Latin American practice of requiring colegio membership for journalists. The focus is a ruling by the Costa Rica Supreme Court that declared the obligatory‐membership requirement of the Costa Rica College of Journalists—one of Latin America's strongest colegios—to be unconstitutional because it violated the free expression clause of the American Convention on Human Rights. The courts incorporation of the American Convention's standard of press freedom is considered for its reliance on a provision of the Costa Rica Constitution that requires human rights protections of international treaties be held superior to national laws. The rationale's significance for the entire region—where 13 countries have colegio laws—is weighed by analyzing comparable clauses in the constitutions of other Latin American countries.