“Restorative Justice and the Right to Privacy.”

Source: (2006) In, Erik Claes, Antony Duff, and Serge Gutwirth. , eds., Privacy and the Criminal Law. Antwerpen-Oxford: Intersentia. PP. 181-196..

“This contribution aims to refine and support Hudson’s account of privacy and restorative justice (I leave aside her insights related to other existing trends that display a penality of the self). I will do this by showing that restorative justice, through its recent shift to the heart of penal culture, involves still other important privacy interests than the ability to keep one’s beliefs, motivations to oneself. Yet this plurality of interests, and here I will try to strengthen Hudson’s argument, does not make a plea for respect for the right to privacy, superfluous. . .The leading theme of my account is of a phenomenological nature. The deeper meaning and value of privacy interests, I will argue, are related to the depersonalising potentials of human inter-subjectivity. Appearing to the other is constitutive of the self. You look at me, therefore I exist. . .My comment will proceed as follows. In section 2 an intuition pro and a few arguments contra the right to privacy will be sketched. Section 3 grounds privacy in the facts of human existence; this leads to a statement of at least four privacy interests. Section 4 shows how these interests could be at stake in the context of restorative justice. Section 5 argues in favour of a common point underlying privacy interests that makes the use of an overarching right to privacy not impossible. And finally, section 6 counteres the objection that privacy do not take priority over other countervailing interests and values. Some clarifications will be provided here of the scope of the notion ‘priority’.” (excerpt)