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As the public service channel France 3 is preparing to broadcast a docu-fiction on the murder of “Little Grégory”, a legal case in the 1980s that attracted much attention from the media and which was never elucidated, court action to preserve the privacy of the people involved in the case continues. A judge in Paris sitting in urgent matters has already dismissed an application from one of the witnesses in the case (see IRIS 2006-3: 13), and now the regional court in Nancy has received applications from other parties in the case. The wife and children of Bernard Laroche, Grégory’s uncle, who was...

At the end of 2005, the Minister for Justice in a late amendment to the Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) Bill added a provision requiring telecom operators to retain data on telephone, mobile and fax calls for a period of three years. Prior to that the requirement had been imposed by direction of the Cabinet, purportedly under a 1983 Act, rather than openly through specific legislation. The lack of transparency, the extent of the retention both in respect of the time period and the range of data have been criticised by successive Data Protection Commissioners (see IRIS 2002-4: 14), ISPs, Digital...

In January 2006, reporters of the Dutch daily newspaper De Telegraaf received confidential information from an anonymous source about a drugs dealer. This information was leaked by a Dutch intelligence service (AIVD) insider to the underworld. Prior to publishing the story, the reporters informed the AIVD about the leak. Subsequently, the AIVD decided to spy on the reporters by tapping their phones and internet connections. In the court case that followed, De Telegraaf asked the judge to order the State to cease the tapping and to delete every record and every copy concerning the reporters. The...

On 11 July 2006 the Lithuanian Parliament ( Seimas ) adopted a new version of the Act on Provision of Information to the Public, which came into force on 1 September 2006. The Act was first adopted in 1996. The new version of the Act provides for the following new elements: announcements, information society media means, information society service, information regarding pornographic content, information regarding erotic content, information regarding violent content, news broadcasts. The confidentiality of information sources was finally regulated by this Act. In Lithuania there were a lot of...

In 2005, the Government decided that in tandem with new defamation legislation it would bring in new privacy legislation. To that end a working group, consisting of a senior lawyer and three civil servants, was set up in July 2005 and reported in March 2006. Its terms of reference required it to consider Articles 8 and 10 ECHR and prepare proposals on a general tort of violation of privacy, and identification of specific offensive forms of invasion of privacy. The group concluded that the arguments in favour of the introduction of a clear statutory cause of action outweighed the arguments against...