Privacy as a Human Right

The right to privacy seems to occupy an entirely natural place within the structure of human rights; for many years now there has been an established jurisprudence on the right to privacy coming from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. At the same time, there have been fundamental conceptual (Thomson, Geuss) and normative (McKinnon) criticisms of the right to privacy. Against these critics, I argue, first, that it is possible to articulate a systematic normative conception of privacy, which explains and supports a general right to privacy; and second, that the right to privacy lies at the very heart of a human right to freedom and autonomy. Without reference to a right to privacy, many other rights to freedom are not realizable. I first develop a normative conception of privacy and its different dimensions, and in a second step take a closer look at the jurisprudence of the ECHR by considering some examples, in order to understand what role the right to privacy plays in the Court's decisions. The right to privacy, far from being reducible to other rights or detrimental to the rights and needs of women, occupies a central place on the list of human rights.