28 January: Data Protection Day
The main judgments of the European Court of Human Rights

Article 8 of the Convention protects private life, in a field of application which has expanded as the Court has added to its case-law. It covers in general the data collected by State bodies (Leander v. Sweden, 1987: use of a secret police file for recruitment purposes). As early as 1984, the Court issued a ruling on a case of telephone tapping by the police (Malone v. United Kingdom), followed in 1990 by another judgement on telephone tapping ordered by the courts (Kruslin v. France). Furthermore, since the judgement in the case of Von Hannover v. Germany in 2004, the protection of images has also come within the scope of Article 8. With the judgement in the case of Peck v. United Kingdom, the "private" sphere expanded to include visual data derived from video surveillance of public places.

In three French cases in 2009*, while reaffirming the fundamental role of the protection of personal data subject to automatic processing, especially for police purposes, the Court concluded that the applicants' inclusion in the national police database of sex offenders, in the way in which it had been applied to them, was not contrary to Article 8.

Article 8 also protects correspondence, whether oral, written (a particularly critical matter for prisoners) or electronic. Use by the police of messages sent via a pager (Taylor-Sabori v. United Kingdom, 2002) and the fitting of a listening device in a private flat (Vetter v. France, 2005) have been ruled to be contrary to the Convention in these cases. Furthermore, in the judgement in the case of Copland v. United Kingdom in 2007, the Court concluded that the monitoring of the applicant's e-mail at work was contrary to Article 8, as no provision was made for this by the law.

The Court has also had to deal with cases relating to biological data. In 1997, in the case of Z. v. Finland, lodged by an applicant suffering from HIV, the Court emphasised the prime importance of the confidentiality of medical data. Recently, in the 2008 case of S. and Marper v. United Kingdom, it concluded that Article 8 had been violated in respect of the retention by the authorities of the DNA profiles of the applicants after the criminal proceedings against them had finished.
The Court has also considered the question of the protection of personal data from the viewpoint of the right of access to such data. As long ago as 1989, for example, the Court said in its judgement in the case of Gaskin v. United Kingdom that the restriction of the applicant's access to his personal file was contrary to Article 8. More recently, in the case of Haralambie v. Romania in 2009, the Court, concluded that this same article had been violated by reason of the obstacles placed in the applicant’s way when he sought access to the file on him drawn up by the secret services in the days of communist rule.

* judgments in the cases of Bouchacourt v. France, Gardel v. France and M.B. v. France (not final)