The Human Rights Monitoring Institute has reached its first significant victory in the strategic litigation case challenging the legal incapacity regulation in Lithuania. In an unprecedented move, Vilnius district court has granted a right to appeal for a woman who was divested of her legal capacity in absentia. In the article by HRMI Research Director Asta Radvilaite, the current situation on legal incapacity regulation and the usual ill-practice in courts is analyzed emphasizing that the right to a fair trial is still an illusion to part of our society.
Imagine that on the election day when you arrive ready to give your vote as a fully competent citizen, you are informed that you have no right to fulfill your civic duty as well as no other rights. Or your employer informs you he has to terminate your work contract as you are legally incapacitated by a court decision even though you were not informed of this and were not aware any legal process had taken place.
These situations are hard to imagine, however they are real life situations, one taken from the famous case in Estonia which ended in 2003, and another – from Lithuania.
Lithuania still holds on to the morally outdated Soviet model of legal incapacity institute which was created seeking to silence opponents of the regime and certainly not to defend the rights of the mentally disabled. According to this model, legal incapacity status literally means the social and legal death of a person and the process of acclaiming a person legally incapacitated does not correspond to the very basic human rights standards.
Distinct from many other Western European countries Lithuania doesn’t have limited legal capacity institution and thus imposes the same severe restrictions of civil and political rights to persons with different levels of capability. Person who has been acclaimed legally incapable loses his/her civil and political rights almost hundred percent – he/she can’t vote, can’t marry, can’t hold a job, but most important – he/she loses right to an effective judicial defense as he/she can not address the court on any reason including the reconstruction of his/her legal capacity.
Asta Radvilaite, HRMI Research Director
See full article (in Lithuanian) in the news portals
Delfi,
Omni, internet daily
Lietuvos rytas and
Bernardinai as well as legal information portal
Infolex.
Recent articles in the media call for a public discussion on the subject of surveillance in the workplace. Recent research by HRMI reveals that a growing number of employers install programs allowing surveillance and monitoring of e-workplaces. Therefore we have an apparently trappy situation where modern technologies provide an option for almost total control of an employee in the electronic space, whereas Lithuanian legal system does not provide sufficient regulation in the field, especially in the form of post-law acts and guidelines for both sides.
According to the European Convention of Human Rights, the Lithuanian State is obliged to guarantee the right to privacy. This includes not only the negative State obligation – not to violate, but also the positive one – to adopt measures necessary to ensure effective enjoyment of this right. The failure to establish clear rules related to surveillance and monitoring of e-communications in the employment context amounts to the failure to respect the State’s positive obligations under the Convention. In practical terms, the lack of regulations leaves employees unprotected against arbitrary restrictions of their privacy.
The aim of regulation on surveillance and monitoring is to shape a fair balance between certain legitimate interests of employers to control e-communications in the workplace and the privacy rights of the employed. Legal regulation in this field should be based on the principles of legitimacy and proportionality.
The principle of legitimacy primarily means that control over the e-communications is only allowed when sanctioned by a specific legal norm. It also includes the obligation to inform an employee about the policy with regard to e-mail and Internet monitoring.
The principle of proportionality allows certain surveillance and monitoring measures only when clearly identified objectives cannot be achieved in a less intrusive way. For example, if specific objectives are achievable by blocking certain sites, employera should not collect data about websearchs conducted by a specific employee.
The Government should adopt rules or similar understatutory regulations without delay, and the Personal Data Protection Inspectorate should issue detailed guidelines to ensure the legality of surveillance and monitoring of e-communications as well as protection of employees’ human rights in the workplace.
For now we should at least ensure that parties in the work relationship be very clear about certain points:
• if the employee is allowed to use electronic mail provided by the employer for personal purposes;
• in what situations the employee can/must use his personal electronic mailbox;
• in what situations copies of email messages are being made;
• for what time period email messages are kept in the server;
• if the employee is allowed to browse the internet;
• what means of monitoring the internet browsing are applied by the employer;
• what type of information may be recorded.
See full article (in Lithuanian) in the news portal Delfi.
The article is based on research which has been conducted in the frame of the long-term project
Right to Respect for Private Life: Situation Analysis. See more about the project
here. See full research report in Lithuanian
here.
This article addresses the sensitive issue of the fight against terrorism vs. human rights. Recent examples of this fight regretfully involve certain dangers to human rights and ultimately democracy as a whole. The authors concentrate on the specific practice of creating lists of individuals suspected of terrorist connections and the repercussions of this practice on human rights.
The issue is becoming more and more disturbing as various initiatives have been applied within the framework of the fight against terrorism that has rapidly and negatively changed the face of Western democracy and the human rights atmosphere in the whole world.
Lists of persons and groups allegedly connected with terror acts is one of these initiatives. The United Nations, European Union and some separate countries have such lists, including Lithuania which approved hers in the beginning of February 2006.
However the legality of these lists is questionable as the criteria for inclusion lack transparency and consequently the procedures are obviously flawed. Restrictions of the rights of the listed individuals violate the presumption of innocence, as well as numerous other human rights. At the same time, there are no effective legal mechanisms to challenge the inclusion to the lists and/or the applied restrictions.
See full article (in Lithuanian) in the internet daily Bernardinai.