"What a 'Private Life' Means for Women" (original) (raw)
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Acta Iuridica Resoviensia, 2023
The democratic society strives for rules to maintain peace and well -being of the citizens. Rules may limit individuals but shall also give them freedom and safety. Human rights are an essential basis of the democracy; therefore, the European Human Rights Convention plays a pivotal role in ensuring these special and necessary rights and freedoms. Right to private life expressed in Art. 8 of the Convention secures a boundary between a public image and a private one, which, however, tends to be breached. The special bond between an individual and the State strives for balancing their separate interests. Even though the d ichotomy of such a relationship perpetuates around public and private matters, a single person is still a separate being in the society build within a State. According to the European Court of Human Rights’ case-law, the State can interfere with a private life in a way that is prescribed by law, necessary in a democratic society, while pursuing a legitimate aim that falls into certain margin of appreciation. However, there is a lively discussion concerning secret surveillance and monitoring of the individuals by the public authorities via obtaining CCTV footage and recordings from street cameras. Data processed in this way falls within the scope of Art. 8 of the Convention and constitutes a private life element. The role of the State is to protect and give freedom to, not freedom from, whereas the role of an individual seems to be to adjust and respect the regulations for the better good. The usage of juxtaposing terminology such as “private” and “public” is crucial, deliberate, and intentional when discussing individual rights in a democratic society. Private life and public society shall be understood and learnt about together, not separately, as the boundaries between them tend to disappear when it comes to the protection of human rights. private life, privacy, human rights, freedom, European Human Rights Convention, European Court of Human Rights, case-law analysis, monitoring, secret surveillance, street cameras
Human Rights of Women and the Public/Private Divide in International Human Rights Law
Croatian Yearbook of European Law and Policy, 2007
The main argument of this paper is that the gendered nature of the divide needs to be transcended and the public/private divide re-conceptualised in a manner that challenges discrimination and violence against women in the private sphere, while protecting women's freedom of self-determination and personal development in both the 'public' and the 'private' sphere. Such a reconstruction of the public/private divide entails using gender analysis in interpreting rights, state responsibility, and equality.
Nordic Journal of Human Rights, 2014
This article compares the application of the right to private and family life across different human rights jurisdictions. It chooses instances of "convergence" (that is, situations that fall under the purview of this right for all jurisdictions) and of "divergence" (situations that fall under the right for some jurisdictions, but under a different right in others). Through this exercise, the article demonstrates how the similarity in the language of the relevant treaties influences treaty application for the "easy" cases, but how, when faced with a "hard" case, a human rights jurisdiction is more likely to follow its own path, which is often more attuned to the legal sensitivities around the implementing body. Therefore, while at the same time institutional fragmentation is avoided in the instances of convergence, the hegemonic tendencies of international human rights law as a European project are also skirted, as seen in the "divergence" cases.
The Synergy of Equality and Privacy in Women’s Rights
2002 U Chi Legal F 137, 2002
for comments on an earlier draft, to and Frank Michelman for helpful discussion of the South African Constitutional Court. Special thanks to Rachel Braunstein for superb research assistance and to the Faculty Research Program at Brooklyn Law School for support.
Private Oppression: How Laws That Protect Privacy Can Lead to Oppression
Kansas Law Review, 2010
The author thanks Alicia Seibel for her valuable research and drafting assistance. 1. See, e.g., MARTHA ALBERTSON FINEMAN & ROXANNE MYKITIUK, THE PUBLIC NATURE OF PRIVATE VIOLENCE 3 (1994) ("Feminist activists and legal practitioners have. .. developed legal definitions of private violence that better reflected women's experiences, pursued the prosecution and punishment of violent men, and helped women to empower themselves."); Elizabeth M. Schneider, The Violence of Privacy, 23 CONN. L. REV. 973, 974 (1990) ("This essay explores the ways in which concepts of privacy permit, encourage, and reinforce violence against women, focusing on the complex interrelationship between notations of 'public' and 'private' in our social understandings of woman-abuse."); Barbara Bennett Woodhouse, A Public Role in the Private Family: The Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act and the Politics of Child Protection and Education, 57 OHIO ST. L.J. 393, 393 (1996) ("address[ing] children's needs for responsible parenting and the continuing struggle to reach an appropriate balance between public and private roles in meeting these basic needs and in preparing children for citizenship").
Feminism, Democracy and the Right to Privacy
Minerva 9. Nov. 2005, 2005
This article argues that people have legitimate interests in privacy that deserve legal protection on democratic principles. It describes the right to privacy as a bundle of rights of solitude, intimacy and confidentiality and shows that, so described, people have legitimate interests in privacy. These interests are both personal and political, and provide the grounds for two different justifications of privacy rights. Though both are based on democratic concerns for the freedom and equality of individuals, these two justifications for privacy can be distinguished because the one is principally concerned with protecting the personal freedom and equality of individuals, while the other is principally concerned with their political equivalents. Feminists have often been ambivalent about legal protection for privacy, because privacy rights have, so often, protected the coercion and exploitation of women, and made it difficult to politicise personal forms of injustice. However, interpreting the content and justification of privacy rights in light of the differences between democratic and undemocratic forms of politics can enable us to meet these concerns, and to distinguish a democratic justification of privacy rights from the alternatives.
Privacy, Equality and Abortion
A Democratic Conception of Privacy
The challenge to those who would provide a democratic justification of abortion rights is to explain why women should have a legal right to abortion when it is fully possible that abortion is murder. Although it is neither unreasonable nor immoral to deny that abortion involves the killing of a being with a right to life, nothing about the right to life in a democracy shows conclusively that the foetus lacks such a right, or that abortion would be consistent with such a right in most circumstances So, if women are to have legal rights to abortion in democracies, we need to know why their interests in abortion are sufficiently compelling to justify what may be the moral and legal equivalent of murder. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court answered that question by claiming that women have a right to privacy. Women’s interests in privacy, the Court affirmed, are sufficiently broad and important to explain why women must be free to make the abortion decision for themselves. However, (though Roe did not deny this,) feminists generally believe that the reason why women should have a legal right to abortion is because this is necessary to their equality with men. Indeed, some feminists believe that we should prefer an equality justification of abortion to a privacy one, even if there is no necessary incompatibility between the two, because on pragmatic grounds it may be easier to articulate and defend a right to abortion if we focus on women’s claims to equality rather than on what can seem more amorphous and controversial claims about the privacy of women. In this chapter I will argue that though there may be pragmatic reasons to present the abortion right one way rather than another, protection for the privacy of women is necessary to a democratic justification of abortion. As a result, I believe, we can no more choose between privacy and equality justifications of abortion rights in a democracy, than we can between the personal and political equality of women. That is not to say that women’s privacy and equality interests in abortion are identical or indistinguishable, because they are not. Indeed, as I will show, there are important differences between the two that we can examine by contrasting women’s interests in personal and political choice, association and expression. However, the distinction between these interests cannot be sharp or absolute in a democracy, nor can we choose between them without justifying coercion and subordination. Hence, while there are many ways in which we might justify abortion rights, given the variety of women’s interests in abortion, these must reflect women’s interests in privacy if they are to be democratic, and so consistent with the freedom and equality of women. The argument will proceed in three stages. First, I will show that in a democracy women have privacy interests in abortion, and that these interests importantly include interests in equality. I will then argue that women’s interests in privacy and equality justify a broad right to abortion in a democracy, although abortion may be murder. Finally, I will show that we can distinguish democratic from undemocratic accounts of the right to abortion because, unlike the latter, the former reflect the importance of privacy to the personal and political equality of women.