Data protection and the right to privacy: Tajikistan's legislation from the perspective of the ECHR and EU law

The thesis explores the evolution of the concepts of privacy and data protection in the ECHR and EU law against the background of the development of advanced technologies, and aims to examine what lessons can be learnt from the relevant Tajik law perspective. The key objective is to provide critical evaluations of the pertinent laws in Tajikistan with a view to bringing them in alignment with European standards. The original contribution of this thesis can be highlighted by the fact that virtually no research has hitherto been carried out on this theme. As Tajikistan is neither a member of the Council of Europe nor a party to EU association agreements, the thesis additionally explores issues regarding the extraterritorial applicability of European norms, the ‘Brussels effect’, and legal transplants. Data protection and privacy are of increasingly acute importance because, in addition to the more long standing concerns around state surveillance, people are challenged to rethink the boundaries of their privacy given the worldwide development of information technologies, along with the extensive data gathered by private corporations. The main findings of the thesis are threefold. First, the thesis shows that Tajikistan’s laws related to surveillance and data protection reflect post-Soviet – and especially Russian – legal thought on the right to private life, indicating differences in comparison with Western concepts of privacy. Secondly, through the in-depth analysis of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) jurisprudence on the one hand, and EU rules – including the EU Charter and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – on the other hand, the thesis identifies a range of overlapping rules as well as some divergencies in the two European human rights systems. In particular, the thesis argues that the ECtHR case law is marked by a more nuanced approach when its notion of privacy seeks to accommodate economic, political, and other differences. By contrast, the EU data protection rules, mostly because of the EU’s harmonization drive, and partly due to their more technical formulation, seem to be intended to provide a more universally applicable standard. Thirdly, in relation to the surveillance and data protection laws in Tajikistan, the thesis suggests that there is considerable scope to enhance fundamental rights protection in line with EU law as well as the standards set by the ECtHR. A supplementary contribution of this thesis is to help initiate wide-ranging deliberations on how the concept of privacy could be reconceived in the Tajik legal discourse while, providing a critique of the current post-Soviet concept of privacy.