Towers, European Court of Justice at Luxembourg. Wikicommons/sprklg. Some rights reserved.The proliferation of mass surveillance practices in recent years has posed a number of tough challenges for the protection of human rights in democratic societies, most notably for the right to privacy.
These challenges have been exacerbated by the considerable diversity in the legal and constitutional protection of privacy across the globe, with states engaging in far-reaching surveillance activity (such as the United States as demonstrated by the Snowden revelations) providing a fragmented and limited constitutional framework for the protection of privacy, especially regarding non-citizens.
At the same time, privacy protection framed strictly from a national/territorial perspective is increasingly inadequate to address the globalisation of surveillance, as evidenced by the proliferation of extraterritorial surveillance practices by states. In view of these challenges and gaps in human rights protection, I want to argue here that the development of a global privacy regime should now be an urgent priority for the global community.
