Human Rights Law Considerations Brought into Play by Public Surveillance

Abstract Chapter 3 acts as an introduction to those rules of international human rights law relevant to the analysis of facial recognition technology (FRT). It begins by setting out the three-part test used to determine whether a measure engaging, or interfering, with a human right amounts to a violation of that right. This test is used to examine whether the police use of FRT is ‘in accordance with the law’, ‘in pursuit of a legitimate aim’, and ‘necessary in a democratic society’.

Particular attention is paid to the first and last components of this test as they constitute the principal human rights frame of analysis for this book. The second part of the chapter analyses the key relevant human rights law provisions, namely the rights to privacy, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, the prohibition of discrimination, and the newly claimed right to a human decision-maker. In order to more fully understand the overall impact of facial recognition deployments, this chapter also introduces the concept of compound human rights harm.

This is a frame of analysis intended to capture the multifaceted harm associated with the chilling effects of surveillance, which engages a number of human rights protections simultaneously.