Surveilling Masses and Unveiling Human Rights - Uneasy Choices for the Strasbourg Court

Abstract

In her inaugural address that was delivered at Tilburg University on 15 December 1 2017, Prof. Eleni Kosta analyzed the right to privacy and its justified limitations as stipulated in the European Convention on Human Rights in relation to secret surveillance. Despite the fact that states’ secret surveillance programs do not constitute a violation of the right to privacy of citizens in and of themselves, they should abide by a strict system of checks and balances. Do technological developments such as algorithmic surveillance warrant refinement of existing guarantees or should we completely rethink the system of checks and balances? Mass surveillance measures increasingly rely on algorithms focusing on groups of people categorized on the basis of various criteria, rather than individuals. However, the nature of mass algorithmic surveillance raises a number of questions in relation to the protection of groups that are generated based on the algorithmic computations. Will the focus of protection remain on the individual, as traditionally done by the European Court of Human Rights, or will new approaches be developed in the regulation of human rights protecting groups of people? In her role as Chair of Technology Law and Human Rights, Eleni Kosta intends to address the crucial need for further research in this area. She will further study the right to freedom of expression, the right to non-discrimination and the right to effective remedies in order to build a comprehensive framework of checks and balances for human rights in the era of mass surveillance.

Keywords: human rights, privacy, surveillance, ECtHR