The Paradox of Archiving: Personality Protection and a Threat in One—Archives and Child Sexual Abuse

Abstract

AbstractPerspectives on the protection of the individual are usually based primarily on the question of how a person and their personality rights may be harmed by the retention and disclosure of data concerning this particular individual. Hence the intentions of the European GDPR to allow for “minimisation” and “storage limitation” when it comes to personal data and the correlating “right to be forgotten” (“right to erasure”). Although these intentions apply primarily to data controllers other than archives, most often of private law provenance, they also apply to archives. Along with this trend, however, the opposite perspective proportionally fades, which is the starting point of this chapter: Apart from the risks associated with the preservation and disclosure of personal data, archiving in the public interest is also one of the tools by which the protection of personality rights can be implemented, even enhanced. Permanent preservation of certain categories of personal data is not only necessary for various future research purposes and official interests, but in some cases such preservation becomes the key guarantee of the protection of personality as well as other human and civil rights. The author will demonstrate this thesis on some specific cases including a specific category of records testifying about sexual abuse inside and outside the Church and the protection of victim rights. An analysis of the opposite situation, in which personal data, especially in archival records, have been misused, will be discussed in more detail in the following chapters.