The police do not owe a duty of care to protect victims from the criminal acts of a third party when investigating or suppressing crime save in exceptional circumstances. This is justified as an application of the omissions principle and on several other grounds. The article argues that most of these justifications are unconvincing and it sets outs a positive rationale for the imposition on the police of a duty of care in respect of sufficiently proximate victims of a negligent omission. The scope of this duty can be coherently delimited by re-adjusting the existing framework of negligence liability of public authorities.
Child Abuse in Foster Care images were disseminated only to local news outlets for identification purposes, thus limiting the intrusion into the applicant's private life to a minimal degree. 77
CONCLUSIONSWhilst it is not reasonable to expect that one can keep private one's participation in a public riot, the measures taken to identify the applicant in JR38 evidently could set back his autonomy and privacy related interests in a number of ways. Taking into account the fact that the applicant was a child at the time of the incident, and he most likely could not have foreseen the subsequent publication of his image and the lasting consequences that this might have on his ability to manage his public reputation and lead an autonomous life, it seems proper that such measures should only be taken where there exist sufficient reasons to do so. The question whether such reasons exist falls to a consideration of the criteria set forth in Article 8(2) of the ECHR. The approach taken by the JR38 majority runs the risk of unduly restricting the scope of Article 8 to exclude situations where an individual's privacy related interests are significantly set back as part of a criminal process. It is surprising that the Supreme Court has created a situation whereby the state is free to disseminate images of suspects in such situations without demonstrating a legitimate aim for the dissemination, and that such measures are necessary in pursuit of this aim.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.