An Appraisal to the Right to Privacy in Cameroon
Department: Law
No of Pages: 38
Project Code: LL4
References: No
Cost: 5,000XAF Cameroonian
: $15 for International students
ABSTRACT
This
thesis deals with an Appraisal to the Right to Privacy in Cameroon. Privacy
rights have always been a huge problem in our society, as many people have
always been faced with privacy rights being violated.
This
study reveals that, Cameroon is not the only country who respects and supports
the safe guarding of the right to privacy, and that privacy can be traced as
far back as 1961 when the justice of the Peace Act in England provided for the
arrest of peeping Toms and Eavesdroppers.
As
a result of this, the government of Cameroon, has gone ahead to support the
fact that people’s privacy should be upheld and respected by ratifying laws
which are in support of privacy rights such as the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights (1966), and many others.
Cameroon
itself went further to ensure privacy rights are safeguarded and protected in
its laws such the Penal Code and even the Constitution. In addition, the laws
provide sanctions for individuals who fail to uphold and strictly abide to the
protection of such rights.
The
study reveals that there are many ways to violate persons privacy, such as
hacking into their social media accounts. However, it clearly explains that
certain persons shall not be able to enforce their rights under such reasons. Such
as, persons considered to be public figures.
The
study further makes it known that even though Cameroon is out to ensure that
the privacy of individuals are protected, the laws itself still have certain
loopholes because these rights still continuously remain violated by other
individuals and the government themselves, and the perpetrators succeed to go
about freely without being punished.
The
study therefore recommends that the government needs to prioritize and increase
the laws governing the respect to privacy, as well as Cameroonians need to be
educated on issues relating to the understanding of the concepts of privacy.
By
so doing, it will go a long way to ensure that persons privacy rights are
respected and help to reduce the amount of cases in courts dealing with
intruding in privacy rights.
CHAPTER ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the
study
Privacy
is care to what it means to be human and it is a basic human right itself. It
is also a fundamental human right recognized in the Universal Declaration of
Human Right and in many other international and regional treaties such as The
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and even The
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
Privacy underpins human dignity and other
values such as freedom of association and freedom of speech. It has become the
most important human right issue of the modern age. The law of privacy can be
traced as far back as 1961 when the justice of the Peace Act in England
provided for the arrest of Peeping Toms and Eavesdroppers.
Almost all countries around world recognized a
right of privacy implicitly or explicitly in their constitution. The Bill of
Rights however reflects the concern of James Madison and other farmers for
protecting specific aspects of privacy can be defined as a fundamental (though
not an absolute) human right.
In
1765, British Lord Camden, striking down a warrant to enter a house and seize
papers wrote, “We can safely say there is no law in this country to justify the
defendants in what they have done; if there was, it would destroy all the
comforts of society, for papers are often the dearest property a man can have.”
Parliamentarian
William Pitt wrote, “The poorest man may in the cottage bid defiance to all the
force of the crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow
though it; the storms may enter; the rain may enter- - but the King of England
cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined
tenement”.
Various
countries developed specific protection for privacy in the centuries that
followed. In 1776, the Swedish Parliament enacted the “Access to Public Records
Act” which required that all government-held information be used for legitimate
purposes.
In
1792, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen declared that
private property is inviolable and sacred. France prohibited the publication of
private facts and set stiff fines in 1858. In 1890, American lawyers Samuel
Warren and Louis Brandeis wrote a seminal piece on the right to privacy as a
tort action describing privacy as “the right to be left alone”.
The
U.S Supreme Court, in two decisions in the 1920s, read the Fourteenth
Amendment’s liberty clause to prohibit states from interfering with the private
decision of educators and parents to shape the education of children.
In
Meyer v. Nebraska the Supreme Court
struck down a state law that prohibited the teaching of German and other
foreign languages to children until the ninth grade. The state argued that
foreign languages could lead to inculcating in students “ideas and sentiments
foreign the best interests of this country.”
The
court, however, in a 7 to 2 decision written by Justice McReynolds concluded
that the state failed the show a compelling need to infringe upon the rights of
parents and teachers to decide what course of education is best for young
students. Justice McReynolds wrote:
“While
this court has not attempted to define with exactness and liberty thus
guaranteed, the term has received much consideration and some of the included
things have been definitely stated.
Without
doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right
of individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life,
to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children,
to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally
to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the
orderly pursuit of happiness by freemen”
Two
years later, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters , the court applied the principles
of Meyer to strike down an Oregon law that compelled all children to attend
public schools, a law that would have effectively closed all parochial schools
in the state.
The privacy doctrine of the 1920s gained
renewed life in the Warren Court of the 1960s when, in Griswold v. Connecticut
, the court struck down a state law prohibiting the possession, sale, and
distribution of contraceptive to married couples.
Different justifications were offered for the conclusion, ranging from Court’s opinion by Justice Douglas that saw the “penumbras” and “emanations” of various Bill of Rights guarantees as creating “a zone of privacy”,
to Justice Goldberg’s partial reliance on the Ninth Amendment’s reference to “other rights retained by the people,” to Justice Harlan’s decision arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Liberty clause forbade the state from engaging in conduct ( such as search of marital bedrooms for evidence of illicit contraceptives) that was inconsistent with a government based “on the concept of ordered liberty.”
In
1969, the Court unanimously concluded that the right of privacy protected an
individual’s right to possess and view pornography (including pornography that
might be the basis for a criminal prosecution against its manufacturer or
distributor) in his own home.
For
one to be able to have his privacy, he should be able to sit in the comfort of
his home and read books of his choice, watch movies of his choice and do many
other things of his choice. The law should have no business telling a man what
to do in the comfort of his own home. Our constitutional heritage should
therefore rebel at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s
minds.
Also,
the Burger Court extended the right to privacy to include a woman’s right to
have an abortion in Roe v. Wade . The
Alaska Supreme Court found constitutional protection for the right of a citizen
to possess and use small quantities of marijuana in his own home.
The
Supreme Court said in 1977 in Moore v. East Cleveland that “the Constitution protects the sanctity
of the family precisely because the institution of the family is deeply rooted
in the Nation’s history and tradition”.
Moore
found privacy protection for an extended family’s choice of living
arrangements, striking down a housing ordinance that prohibited a grandmother
from living together with her two grandsons. Justice Powell said, “The choice
of relatives in this degree of kinship to live together may not lightly be
denied by the state.”
The
Courts went further to recognize in 1990 in Cruzan v. Missouri Department of
Health that an individual has the
liberty interest that includes the right to make decisions to terminate
life-prolonging medical treatments although the Courts accepted that states can
impose certain conditions on the exercise of that right.
In
2003, the Supreme Court overruling an earlier decision in Lawrence v. Texas
found that Texas violated the liberty clause of two gay men when it enforced against
them a state law prohibiting homosexual sodomy. The court reaffirmed in broad
terms the Constitution’s protection for privacy.
Interest in the right of privacy increased in
the 1960s and 1970s with the coming of information technology (IT). The
surveillance potential of powerful computer systems prompted demands for
specific rules governing the collection and handling of personal information.
In several countries, new constitutions reflect this right.
The
origin of modern legislation in this area can be traced to the first data
protection law in the world enacted in the Land of Hesse in Germany in 1970.
This was followed by national laws in Sweden (1973), the Unites States, Germany
(1977) and France (1978).
Privacy
is a basic human right which gives birth to liberty. This is because if one
does not have privacy, he therefore has no liberty. Jean Jacques Rousseau a
French writer and philosopher said “man is born free but everywhere in chains”.
Lord
Akin in his observation in Donoghue v. Stevenson (1932), pointed the right to privacy when he
pointed out that one must take reasonable care as to acts which does not affect
his neighbor. The right to privacy is provided for by the constitution in its
Preamble which is law as per Article 45 of the Human Declaration of Human
Rights, and through the penal code which protects the right of persons.
Privacy
law in Cameroon embodies several legal concepts, one is the invasion of
privacy, a tort based in common law, allowing an aggrieved party to bring a law
suit against an individual who unlawfully intrudes into his or her private
affairs, discloses his or her private information, publicizes him or her in a
false light or appropriates his or her name for personal gain.
Public
figures have less privacy and this is an evolving area of the law as it relates
to the media. This is because as a
public figure, the life of the individual is open to the public. The public
tends always want to find out about their lives, marriages, education and many
more.
As
a public figure, the media tends to always write about them, digging into their
personal lives, calling them for interviews, and a result of these, it greatly
reduces their privacy.
1.2 Statement of the
problem
It is true that Cameroon is against the
violation of privacy of individuals, and even goes further to provide for
sanctions for persons who go contrary to this. Nevertheless, Cameroon is not
without problems in relation to violation of privacy rights of individuals.
For
example, sometimes the law enforcement officials may violate persons privacy
rights by forcefully entering into their homes. One of greatest problem of the
study is the fact that, privacy rights are hardly respected in our society
today, and even when some are respected, they can never be respected to the
fullest.
We
therefore only seek to ensure that the most important of these rights are
respected by the court and the state. In our societies today, many individuals
do not consider privacy rights as something to which a lot of importance should
be attributed to, they therefore turn to shy away to enforce these rights when
they are being violated by the state.
As
concerns the emerging of the internet, even though Cameroon has ratified the
2010 Law on Cyber Criminality, to kick against and punish persons who use the
internet for fraudulent activities and even infringing into person’s privacy,
protection of privacy rights has become a problem.
The
recording of information about specific interest activities has become one of
the biggest threats. People no longer have full privacy on the internet, a lot
of scamming now arose and people’s personal information are being hacked into
and some even scammed of lots of money.
Persons
use the internet to get personal information about others, such as hacking into
their Facebook pages, What Sapp, and even twitter accounts. Violation of
privacy particularly concerning technology is a very big problem which has to
be looked into and tried to be critically dealt with.
There
exist too many different customs and backgrounds, making it a problem to be
able to know what really can be considered privacy, because what is considered
private to one may not be the same to another person. Also, what are the
yardstick can we use to ascertain if a particular situation is considered
private and the other is not.
1.3 Research question
The major questions arising here are;
- How does the law protect privacy rights in Cameroon?
- What are the various ways in which privacy rights can be violated?
- How effective are the laws on privacy?
- What policy recommendations can be made for the right to privacy to be effective?
1.4 The Research
objectives
1.4.1 General objectives
- To examine the extent to which the right to privacy is protected under the Cameroonian legal frame work.
1.4.2 Specific objectives
- To discuss and carefully bring out the various ways in which privacy rights can be violated.
- To analyse the effectiveness of the laws governing the respect of the rights to privacy.
- To make policy recommendation with respect to the right to privacy.
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