Annamaria Westregård

This dissertation deals with personal privacy in working life. Humans have legitimate expectations and claims to respect for and non-interference with personal privacy in many areas and stages of life. The work place is just one of them. The point departure when dealing with privacy matters at the workplace is primarily the claim by individual employees to respect for and non-interference with their private sphere. An event of overriding importance is the enactment in 1994 of the 1950 Council of Europe Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms as domestic statutory law. Severe tension within the Swedish legal system is one of the results. Labour and employment law is one arena where this is strongly felt. The Nordic model for labour and industrial relations is characterised by a very high unionisation rate, strong labour market organisations on both sides and heavy reliance on collective agreements as instruments for regulation. EU law puts strong emphasis on the individual employee and relies primarily on statutory law. The influence of EU law is particularly notable in privacy matters. The purpose of the thesis is twofold. First it is to arrive at intellectual clarity concerning notions and concepts related to personal privacy matters and the way these are used. The perspective here is theoretical. Second, the purpose is to present the law as it stands today on personal privacy matters. Here the perspective is that of a legal scholar doing traditional legal research. However, the approach is rather analytical. The task also supersedes traditional legal dogmatism since there are many lacunae in existing legal regulation.