ABSTRACT
This book is about some of the ways in which private individuals and bodies are required by law to respect the civil and political rights of others. It is a question of considerable practical importance and, in many systems, political relevance. Some of the countries considered in this collection have moved fairly recently towards new forms of human rights protection and are now considering how – if at all – these changes impact on the private sphere. South Africa (with its new constitutional settlements of 1993 and 1996) and the United Kingdom (with the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998) fall into this category. Others have been grappling with the issue of private sphere protection for decades: in these jurisdictions outbursts of debate and discussion still take place when new legislation is passed or when court decisions are made on the subject. Germany is a good example. We shall be considering how human rights have affected private relationships in these and a range of other jurisdictions, and seeking to draw lessons from comparisons between them. The application of human rights protections such as are found in constitutional documents, case law or international instruments in the private sphere is, as we shall see, conceptualised in different ways in different jurisdictions. In Germany the fairly well-know term Drittwirkung (or ‘third party effect’) is used but, as we shall see, there are a number of other ways in which the effect or function of private sphere protection is expressed. We have chosen the phrase ‘human rights and the private sphere’ as the title for this collection in order to be able to generalise about these issues and avoid assuming any particular model or conceptualisation of the phenomenon.
