The Study Of Restriction And Protection For Public Figures’ Right Of Privacy

Privacy, as a fundamental civil right, has serious significance without saying over decades. As the development of society, the legal protection of privacy is also increasingly perfect and improved. Public figure, as a member of society, are entitled to the same legal protection, while due to the differences from vulgar more or less, their privacy is restricted naturally. So, at the present stage,it is an important task of us to identify a balance between the restriction and protection.In this study, the public figure is not a legal concept, so it is particularly important to clear the concept of public figures, the biggest difference between public figures and ordinary individuals is the words and behaviors of the former will be of widespread concern and influence at a certain time and space. This feature of public figures determines that their privacy will be violated inadvertently. On the one hand, people’s awareness of the protection of personal privacy is strengthened in the modern society, resulting in the demand of privacy protection. On the other hand, it has become a part of daily life for ordinary individuals to mine privacy of the public figures.It leads conflicts between privacy and other rights of the public figures growing, which needs law to take balance. However, the protection of privacy of this stage is not very perfect, judicial practice on the protection of privacy of public figures is barely, which can not form an effective protection mechanism. The focus of this paper is to analyze the boundary of the restriction and protection, on which basis we can put forward some suggestions on the legislation and judicial practice.The first part of this paper composes of cases besides preface.which pointed out some problems of the privacy of public figures we are facing with on this stage. The preface is followed by the case of Germany, the Princess of Morocco, as a starting point, to illustrate how to deal with this issue as well as the the existence of controversy in some of the developed countries.The second part of this paper introduces the concept of the public figure, privacy of the public figure, its classification and the conflict with other rights.The third part is the core of the entire paper, focusing existed theoretical research on the privacy of public figures, development status of foreign legislation, jurisprudence on privacy issues related to public figures, which combined with our present stage of legislation, judicial situation, reveals the problems of our law in this regard.The last part of the article summarizes the experience of the above sections, obtained the path and method of privacy for public figures at this stage, mainly in terms of the legislative and judicial practice. At the level of legislative, in order to strengthen the protection, it’s expected to introduce the concept of public figures into code and make the principle of public interest as a guiding principle. At the level of judicial practice, the privacy of public figures should be classified into different categories in the specific cases, with varying different kinds of public figures, the degrees of restrictions and protection of their privacy are different. Finally, take necessary protection principles of the privacy of public figures, which should be clear that ordinary citizens enjoy equal treatment in terms of privacy protection under the premise of not involving the public interest.