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MILAN LIPOVSKÝ CYIL 7 ȍ2016Ȏ
from one’s embarrassments (and regaining aspects of privacy) was almost impossible.
Since the industrial revolution, people have moved to the anonymity of big cities
(today more than half of Earth’s population lives in cities1). And so now, due to
social media, chatting devices and online information being copied and re-pasted all
the time, we have returned to a village, this time a global village where “interesting”
issues, once uploaded online, remain there and strip the particular person of his
privacy. We live more and more online, where information is not so easily forgotten
or escaped from. This period of history is being called the digital era.2
In relation to fighting criminal activities, the States are also increasingly using
modern technologies that were unimaginable in the 1960s when the most important
human rights treaties were designed. So-called DNA databases can certainly be
understood as breaching the right to privacy if the DNA samples are kept by
investigating bodies even in spite of no charge being brought against the suspect later
in discontinued proceedings.3
Last but not least, many reports on mass surveillance systems worry the international
civil society. This article focuses on the surveillance systems of the so-called cyber
space and their legality under international law.
2. Terminology
There are certain terms that need explanation before we go on with a description
of legal issues. Everyone who has ever used the internet has been to the so-called
cyber space. It is “all of the data stored in a large computer or network represented as
a three-dimensional model through which a virtual-reality user can move.”4 Using other
words, it is a digital space enabling computers to operate and to be connected, as
well as enabling individuals to “move” within it and search and upload information.
A large part of social life has moved to cyber space, as real human contact has
increasingly been replaced by social contact media – the post is being replaced by
email providers, chatting instruments substitute for real contact etc. Since large parts
of human interaction are located within cyber space, the problematic issues, such as
interference with privacy, have largely moved there as well.
1 Webpage of the United Nations URL
world-urbanization-prospects-2014.html> [last visited June 7, 2016].
2 UN, The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age. Report of the Office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights. A/HRC/27/37.
3 Such a system would, among other things, create an undefendable discrimination, where those who
were “in the hands” of police (though later found innocent) would have their DNA samples in the
database, while guilty but unfound perpetrators would not. This paradox even leads to obscure ideas
of putting everyone’s samples in the proposed DNA databases. URL
uk/2007/sep/05/humanrights.ukcrime> [last visited June 12, 2016].
4 Webpage URL > [last visited June 7, 2016].