Right to privacy and protection of commercial secrets in civil procedure

Right to Privacy and Protection of Commercial Secrets in Civil Procedure The topic of the paper concerns the right to privacy and the protection of commercial secrets in the civil procedures. The aim of this work is to discuss how the aforementioned rights are ensured in the civil procedures. It is to be believed, that the relevance of this topic is obvious, since the number of the infringements of the right to privacy is constantly increasing in the modern world and the commercial secrets are becoming increasingly more significant. In the first and the second parts of the paper, the notions of the right to privacy and the commercial secrets are described. It should be noted, that there is no single and universal notion that describes both of these rights. Therefore, when searching for the notion that describes them in the best possible way, the legislation of the Republic of Lithuania, the European Union, and the other foreign countries was analysed, together with the discussion on and the comparison of the concepts presented in them. In addition to this, this work is based on the scientific articles related to this topic and the jurisprudence of the Lithuanian and the foreign courts in order to present the most universal notion of the right to privacy and the commercial secrets after analysing and systemising these sources. The third part of the paper mainly focuses on the ensurance of the right to privacy and the protection of the commercial secrets, namely in the civil procedures. There is also a discussion on the cases, when, in order to protect the aforementioned rights, the principle of the public access to the court proceedings may be subject to restriction, it may be declared closed to the public, or all or a part of the case file may be declared non-public. What is more, it includes an analysis of the situations, when photographs and video or audio records are presented as evidence in the case, to the extent that is permissible and does not infringe on the right to privacy and the protection of the commercial secrets. This part of the work also features a short discussion on the anonymization institute of the decisions of the court proceedings, its necessity, and its advantages and disadvantages. In order to reach the aforementioned objectives, most of the attention is paid to the practical analysis of the cases and the discussion on the various situations and the practice formed by the courts regarding numerous matters