Our human right to be kept in the dark

YOU CAN TELL A LOT ABOUT A COUNTRY by seeing how easy it is for people to suppress material about themselves which they would prefer the rest of the public not to see. If you believe in open society, then broadly speaking the harder this is, the better for all of us.

is is, the better for all of us. On this score Britain has seen a major change in the last 30 years or so. In 1990, you could pretty much say anything you pleased about a person provided it was true (unless you had been told it in confidence); if you took a picture in a public place, you could publish it wherever and however you wanted. No longer. We are rapidly becoming a society based on a paternalistic “need to know” principle, where even true information about, or public pictures of, a person can be kept under fairly tight wraps, and only published if it is determined by a judge that there is good reason to do so. What is more worrying is that this rather massive change in social policy has taken place with virtually no democratic input.

Partly this is the fault of the EU’s draconian data protection law, but the main culprit is one you might not expect: human rights law. Most of the restrictions on what we can read or see are due to an astonishing exercise in mission creep by human rights lawyers, aided and abetted by the European Court of Human Rights and, of course, by our own new governing class. Let me explain.

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