Comment On The Restriction On Civil Servant's Right To Privacy

The right to privacy is an important item among the rights to personality enjoyed by citizens (natural persons) and is strictly protected by law in general case. However, because of the special identity of the civil servant, the scope of his right to privacy is less than that enjoyed by ordinary citizen and some of his personal life has already become one part of political life. In addition, some of his privacy which may affect political and public interests shall be known by citizens and therefore the conflict exists between the citizen's right to know political information and the civil servant's right to privacy. Since the civil servant possesses power which originates from right and the improper exercise of power will lead to damage to right, the conflict between the right to know political information and the right to privacy is actually the conflict between right and power. In order to protect the proper exercise of power, the right to know political information must be strengthened and the right to privacy enjoyed by the civil servant must be restricted. The reality of anti-corruption movement in China suggests that most corruption happens during the private life after the 8 working hours. So it is the effective method and imperative policy to restrict the civil servant's right to privacy. In addition, the special identity of civil servant is acquired based on voluntary and certain interests gained by the civil servant are enough to compensate the restriction of part of his right to privacy. Therefore, the law shall protect the citizen's right to know in priority and appropriately restrict the civil servant's right to privacy. Mainly, the systems of making public of personal basic information of the civil servant, reporting familyimportant events, assets declaration and media supervision shall be adopted to restrict the civil servant's right to privacy;at the same time the existing relevant system and regulations shall be improved and perfected in order to make it timely for relevant departments to capture "corruption information" from the civil servant' activities after the eight working hours and to investigate and solve this problem promptly. Only in this way, the effective supervision on power can be achieved. Of course this restriction does not completely deny the civil servant's right to privacy. The law grants the civil servants protection of the right to privacy which is totally irrelevant to political life or public interests equal to other natural persons. They can seek protection via constitution, civil law, criminal law or other legal procedures when their rights to privacy are infringed.