The Right To Private Sphere

As a personality right, the right to privacy is growing in popularity based onemphasizing personal dignity and freedom. However, with the development oftechnology and science, modernization makes the protection of personal privacyfacing the hitherto unknown challenge while bringing more and more materialenjoyment for people. Under this background, strengthen the protection of citizen’sright to privacy becomes more and more important and urgent. Although Torts Lawof People’s Republic of China has established the right to privacy as an independentcivil right, the law doesn’t further divide the scope of privacy protection, suchprotection is woefully inadequate for the growing problem of infringement to privacy.At the same time, in the theoretical fields, when academics have studied the exactcontents of the right to privacy, they mostly focus on the right to private informationas a category of the right to privacy, but they ignore the theoretical research on theright to private sphere as another category of the right to privacy, which isn’tconducive to establish a comprehensive privacy content system or improve privacyprotection system. This article chiefly researches “the right to private sphere”, and usethe experience of private sphere protection from the relevant state or district based onthe research and analysis about the conflict and coordination between the right toprivate sphere and other rights and the problem of infringement to privacy sphere toanalyze the existing legal protection of the right to private sphere and theshortcomings in order to perfect our legal protection system of the right to privatesphere. Besides the introduction, this article is divided into four parts as follows:The first part mainly states the basic theory of the right to private sphere. Firstly,this part puts forward that the right to private sphere belongs to the right to privacy bydividing the specifics of the right to privacy, and proposes the concept of the right toprivate sphere on this basis. Secondly, this part analyzes the subject and object of theright to privacy, and the difference between the right to private sphere and the right toprivate information in order to grasp the basic theory of the right to private sphere.Finally, this part puts forward that the right to privacy is essential for achievingpersonal dignity and strengthening people’ security and trust. The second part mainly discusses the conflict and coordination between publicinterest, ownership and the right to private sphere. The frequent events ofinfringement to private sphere become the foci of social concern, but the nature ofthese events is the conflict between public interest, ownership and the right to privatesphere. Normally, public interest is prior to private interest, with which as a premise,this part researches the conflict and coordination between the right to private sphereand public interest, and solves the conflict between the right to private sphere andownership through applying the principle of right hierarchy, the principle of interestsbalance and the principle of prohibiting right abuse, thereby defining the limit ofexercising rights properly so as to effectively protect the lawful rights of obliges.The third part mainly expounds the identification of liability in infringement ofthe right to private sphere. This part starts to introduce the elements of liability, whichgenerally include tort, damage reality, causality and fault, then probe intocompensation for loss, cessation of infringement and apology, which belong to theforms of liability in infringement of the right to private sphere. In the end, this partdiscusses the plea causes of tort liability. In addition to the typical causes ofperforming the duty in accordance with the law, emergency action and victim consent,the plea causes of liability in infringement of the right to private sphere containjustifiable defense, force majeure, fault of sufferer and act of third person.The fourth part mainly researches the existing legal protection and legislativeperfection of the right to private sphere. Facing the growing problem of infringementto private sphere, our current laws are short of the direct protection and systematicrules of the right to private sphere the growing problem of infringement to privatesphere so that the current privacy legislations are unable to meet the demands ofpeople in information age. Therefore, by learning from and drawing on legislationsand theories of private sphere protection from America and Taiwan, this part analyzesthe current situation and problems of our country’s legal protection based on theresearches about the basic theory of the right to private sphere, the conflict andcoordination between the right to private sphere and other rights and the identificationof liability in infringement of the right to private sphere so as to put forward relevantcountermeasures on perfecting the legal protection of the right to private sphere.