…privacy matters

Privacy matters. It matters when you’re walking the streets of your home town and when you’re fleeing your home in search of safety. It matters if you’re at a protest or if you’re in bed.

Our wellbeing in each of these instances depends on the protection of our privacy. No situation can be fully understood in isolation.

Unjustifiable intrusions on our privacy become a weapon to eradicate communities and prey upon refugees and asylum seekers, push people away from protests in fear of retribution, and interrupt our rest time.

Privacy protects and enables our rights. All of them.

Privacy is often the ground on which conflicts in our daily lives, communities,and societies are fought, but the stakes are always bigger.

Take Article 7 - the right to non-discrimination. In 1981, the first successful case against the criminalisation of sex between men before the European Court of Human Rights was won on the grounds of privacy. Similarly, in 2018 India’s Supreme Court overturned the colonial era law criminalising homosexuality on the grounds of privacy.

There are similar stories for every single article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

To build the kind of future that we want, we first need to recognise that privacy isn’t a luxury, or a side thought, or something that can be sacrificed for convenience. Instead it is a fundamental human right, without which you can’t adequately protect other rights.

Privacy is the foundation on which we can build a future we can be proud of tomorrow. And it is the tool that we can use to fight for all of our rights today.

PI exists to fight for our freedom to be human - to live, learn, and develop. Privacy matters.

You can donate to PI and help us to keep fighting for our rights at support.privacyinternational.org

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein. Article 30, Rights are inalienable