Privacy Rights/Conflicts with other Rights/Position
Is there a perception that this right is above or higher than other fundamental rights, or in general, that it has a particular place in a hierarchy of rights?
Joseph Wronka posits that the UDHR has tiers of rights, arranged by article. Article 1, human dignity, is the first and foremost right. Articles 2-21, which includes the right to privacy in Article 12, are civil and political rights, protecting people from their government. The right to speech, press, religion, and vote are also protected in these articles (Wronka, 1994; UDHR 1948) . Below these rights were the positive rights in which a government should provide “to ensure an existence worthy of human dignity” and solidarity rights (Wronka, 1994) . So, there is some recognition of a hierarchy between fundamental rights, but nothing has been written on the hierarchy among rights of the same tier.
In practice, however, privacy seems to be overshadowed by other rights. On one hand, privacy rights can overtake rights such as the freedoms of speech and press. On the other hand, these rights have stifled privacy rights in many instances. Hixon suggests that privacy rights prevail in cases of information gathering but press and speech rights prevail during and after publishing (Hixon, 1987, 178). Mills suggests this difference in protection is due to the publication medium and the perceived benefit to the public (Mills, 2008, 36, 117).
In the United States, some scholars have noted that “free-speech and free-press rights almost always trump information privacy rights,” suggesting there is a hierarchy within fundamental rights in at least one nation (Mills, 2008, 108). Hixon referred to privacy as “at best a correlative right,” and “sociological notion,” while Milles calls it a “precondition” (Hixon, 1987, 44, 45; Mills, 2008, 116). Press freedoms only require a “newsworthy” and “public interest” standard to be upheld, while privacy rights have had to be fought for continuously in courts. In this fight, the inadequacy of American privacy law has shown through, stemming from the lack of explicit protection in the Constitution (Hixon, 1987, 76). Public figures continuously have information published about them, protected under free speech, leaving them vulnerable to the news cycles (Hixon, 1987, 133).
References:
Hixon, R.F. (1987) . Privacy in a public society: Human rights in conflict. Oxford University Press.
Mills, J.L. (2008) . Privacy: The lost right. Oxford University Press. Universal Declaration on Human Rights. UNGA. Dec. 10, 1948. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
Wronka, J. (1994) . Human rights and social policy in the United States: An educational agenda for the 21st Century. Journal of Moral Education 23(3). https://doi.org/10.1080/ 0305724940230304