The Digital Privacy at Stake in Criminal Justice
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Abstract
The Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights deals with the need of respect for privacy. The 4th Amendment to the US Constitution addresses the same issue. The criminal procedure ensures the protection of privacy, as far as possible, and the praxis must recognize that, for privacy reasons, there should be limits to the seizure of computer records and to its off-site analysis. Among the critical aspects of the off-site analysis of electronic data, the approach to be adopted by the law enforcement officers in the face of serendipity findings largely remains an unanswered question. The doctrine of the European Court of Human Rights is characterized by some ineffectiveness in the creation of remedies for the violation of privacy in criminal proceedings, namely with regard to the search of data contained on computers and its off-site analysis, mainly because it does not order the exclusion of computer-generated evidence that has been illegally gathered, which should be the case, in the light of the fair trial principle. The knowledge of the North American case law and guidelines could represent a valuable contribution to the improvement of Strasbourg jurisprudence, in its decision-making role and also in its nomophylactic function, as well as to the improvement of European national legal systems at the legislative level and at the level of decision-making processes.
Keywords
computer-generated evidence, digital search warrant, off-site search, plain view doctrine, privacy, seizure by chanceReferences
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.33115/udg_bib/qf.i2.22487Published
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Copyright (c) 2021 Paulo Manuel Mello de Sousa Mendes
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