A conceptual legal framework for privacy, accountability and transparency in visual surveillance systems

Abstract

The United Kingdom uses visual surveillance techniques on a huge scale, but its regulation of those techniques has been sadly lacking. This paper seeks to consider the extent to which the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) provides an overarching framework for the regulation of visual surveillance practices, both overt and covert, thereby bringing about the conditions for accountability and transparency, and to critically analyse the extent to which UK law operates within that framework so far as it applies to video surveillance.