Introduction

Health information privacy is one aspect of the right to privacy. Wacks regards the notion of “personal information” as essential to such a right. This he defines as being:

Much of the Anglo-American legal discourse concerning privacy in the common law tradition derives from a crucially influential article in the 1890 Harvard Law Review. The authors of this article, Warren and Brandeis, examined US case law and suggested that elements of this case law, such as defamation, copyright and breach of confidence, culminated in recognition of a right to privacy, which they regarded as being a “right to be left alone”. Health information is today commonly regarded as an important part of an individual's right to information privacy, and indeed information worthy of particular protection. Information privacy in the health context is integrally linked to the perceived inherent sensitivity of health information. In this chapter, we explore the effects of EU law on rights to privacy in health contexts, which include both health care and clinical research settings.

As we noted in chapter 1, there is no “European health law” in the sense of a harmonised set of health care or medical entitlements, applicable across the whole of the EU, determined by institutions at EU level, and indeed many elements of “health law” are not the subject of EU regulation.