Gaughran v Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland: the Need for Evidence-Based Reasoning
The UK Supreme Court has recently held that the indefinite retention of the DNA profiles of convicted adults does not violate article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights...
Pakistan’s New Cyber Law Puts Civil Liberties and Freedom of Expression in Danger
On April 16, in Pakistan, the National Assembly Standing Committee on Information and Technology approved the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Bill 2015. Procedural safeguards and fundamental principles of law have...
Kenyan High Court Declares Law Criminalizing HIV Transmission Unconstitutional
On 18 March 2015, in Aids Law Project v Attorney General and Others [2015] the High Court of Kenya declared section 24 of the HIV and AIDS Prevention and Control...
Tentative Reform of State Surveillance Powers in the UK
Rumblings of discontent have been heard from the supervisory bodies that are entrusted with providing oversight of surveillance operations by UK intelligence agencies. While these demonstrate that the security services...
S.A.S v France: Controlling Identities in European Liberal Democracies
As discussed in previous posts, the ECtHR decided in S.A.S v France that the French criminal law ban on face coverings in all public places does not violate European human...
Privacy, Data Protection and Police Records
Can the retention of records by the police relating to acts that occurred in public be contrary to the right to privacy? Such a matter was recently considered by the...
The Geography of International Law and the Cyber Domain
The geographical scope of the law of armed conflict (LOAC) has engaged the interest of IHL experts for some years dividing opinion as to whether the reach of the law...
Northern Ireland’s Human Rights Commission Granted Leave for Judicial Review to Challenge the Country’s Near-Blanket Ban on Abortion
Unlike the rest of the UK, Northern Ireland is not covered by the Abortion Act 1967. If you are a woman living there who wishes to terminate a pregnancy, the...
The Legality of Mass Surveillance Operations
A court which isn’t a court in name rules on the legality of a government mass surveillance program that may or may not exist. That about sums up the Kafkaesque...
Will Australia learn from the EU’s mistakes on data retention?
Police officers, anti-terrorism officials and politicians all tell us that we need data retention laws, especially in a time of increased technological sophistication. This week, George Brandis—the Attorney General for...
Anti-Terrorism Review Reform: Some Considerations
In mid-July, the UK government announced its intention to abolish the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation – the office tasked to review the UK’s anti-terrorism laws – and replace it...
The Supreme Court of Canada Affirms Privacy as Anonymity
This is a critical time for privacy on the internet. Private entities, from the global, all-knowing Google to a local Internet Service Provider (ISP), retain sensitive and private information about...
