Rights explained Article 8
Article 8 ECHR: Respect for Private and Family Life and Its Limits
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to respect for private and family life, protects four interests: private life, family life, the home and correspondence. The Court has repeatedly said that private life is a broad concept, which is why the article has been invoked in cases on surveillance, health, reputation and, in sport, on anti-doping controls and professional sanctions.
What does Article 8 protect?
The text of paragraph 1 is: "Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence." Paragraph 2 then sets the conditions under which a public authority may interfere with it.
According to the Court's guide, private life is a concept incapable of exhaustive definition. It covers the physical and psychological integrity of a person and can embrace multiple aspects of physical and social identity, a line of reasoning that goes back to Niemietz v. Germany (1992).
When may a public authority interfere?
Paragraph 2 permits no interference by a public authority except one that is in accordance with the law and necessary in a democratic society for one of a closed list of aims.
The aims named in the text are national security, public safety, the economic well-being of the country, the prevention of disorder or crime, the protection of health or morals, and the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. The sport cases below show how the balance between these aims and the individual's interests is assessed.
Where is the boundary of private life?
The Court has also drawn limits around the concept. In Friend and Others v. the United Kingdom (decision of 24 November 2009), applicants challenged the statutory bans on hunting with dogs in the United Kingdom as a breach of their private life and, for some, their homes. The Court declared the complaints manifestly ill-founded: private life is broad but does not protect every activity a person pursues with others, and hunting was too far removed from personal autonomy.
It added that the concept of home did not include land over which the owner permitted or caused a sport to be conducted, since that would strain the meaning of the word.
How has Article 8 been applied to athletes?
In Fédération Nationale des Syndicats Sportifs (FNASS) and Others v. France (18 January 2018), professional athletes challenged a rule requiring them to give quarterly whereabouts information, including a sixty-minute daily slot for unannounced anti-doping tests. The Court found no violation for 17 of the individual applicants, concluding that France had struck a fair balance. It reasoned that reducing the obligations would increase the dangers of doping to health and would be at odds with the European and international consensus on unannounced testing.
In Platini v. Switzerland (decision of 11 February 2020), a former footballer and UEFA president challenged a four-year suspension from football activity imposed in disciplinary proceedings over a 2 million Swiss franc payment. The Court declared the application inadmissible, finding the sanction neither excessive nor arbitrary given the seriousness of the misconduct and his senior position, and noting that he had been afforded procedural safeguards to challenge FIFA's decision. The suspension had also been reduced by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and a fine of 60,000 Swiss francs accompanied it.
A third decision, Athletics South Africa v. Switzerland (5 October 2021), was linked to the Semenya case and concerned the eligibility regulations of the then IAAF for athletes with differences of sex development. The Court declared it inadmissible because the national federation, as a legal entity, was not a direct and personal victim of the alleged violations.
