Benchmarks for Global Privacy Standards (November 2009)

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2. Current global privacy initiatives

Privacy is a vital human right, recognised in all major international human rights instruments, including:

• Article 12, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, <http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/>.
• Article 17, The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 1966, <http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm>.

Information privacy rights are elaborated in more detail in other significant legal instruments, including:

• OECD Guidelines on the Protection and Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data, 1980, <http://www.oecd.org/document/0,2340,en_2649_34255_1815186_1_1_1_1,00.html>.
• Council of Europe Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data, 1981, <http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/108.htm> and the Additional Protocol to the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data regarding supervisory authorities and transborder data flows, 2001, <http://conventions.coe.int/treaty/en/treaties/html/181.htm>.
• EU Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data 1995, <http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:31995L0046:EN:HTML>.
• APEC Privacy Framework, 2005, <http://www.apec.org/>.

Information privacy rights are also the subject of several new global initiatives, including:

• International Data Protection Commissioners
  The Joint Proposal for a Draft of International Standards on the Protection of Privacy with regard to the processing of Personal Data (referred to in this article as the Data Protection Commissioners Standard) has been prepared by a Working Group of international Data Protection Commissioners, co-ordinated by the Spanish Data Protection Agency. It will be published in November 2009.
• The Galway Project
  The Centre for Information Policy Leadership, through a process facilitated by the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, is working with a panel of experts to ‘define the essential elements of accountability... and suggest additional work necessary to establish accountability as a trusted mechanism for information governance’. A draft working paper is available.
• International Standards Organisation (ISO)
  The International Standards Organisation is considering several privacy related proposals. A Privacy Task Force made a series of Recommendations in September 2009, including a recognition that ‘an ISO privacy standard is increasingly needed in the ever developing networked and distributed computing and communications environment’.

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