Defining "Private Life" Under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights by Referring to Reasonable Expectations of Privacy and Personal Choice

The European Court and Commission of Human Rights have in the past been criticized for failing to provide sufficient and consistent guidance on how to define “private life” under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This Paper traces the recent emergence of a “reasonable expectation of privacy” test in some of the Court’s judgments as a means for defining private life in certain circumstances and suggests that such a test should be further refined and expanded to apply in all circumstances in which private life is alleged to have been implicated. Specifically, the Court proposes that private life cases should be analyzed with some species of the following principle: A public authority may not without proper justification interfere with or fail to respect matters in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy or personal choice. Suggestions are then made on how to apply such a test