R.E. v. United Kingdom (Application No. 62498/11)

Key paragraph(s) can be found below the document.

Paragraph 131: “The present case concerns the surveillance of legal consultations taking place in a police station, which the Court considers to be analogous to the interception of a telephone call between a lawyer and client. The Court has recognised that, while Article 8 protects the confidentiality of all correspondence between individuals, it will afford “strengthened protection” to exchanges between lawyers and their clients, as lawyers would be unable to defend their clients if they were unable to guarantee that their exchanges would remain confidential (Michaud v. France, no. 12323/11, § 118, ECHR 2012). The Court therefore considers that the surveillance of a legal consultation constitutes an extremely high degree of intrusion into a person’s right to respect for his or her private life and correspondence; higher than the degree of intrusion in Uzun and even in Bykov. Consequently, in such cases it will expect the same safeguards to be in place to protect individuals from arbitrary interference with their Article 8 rights as it has required in cases concerning the interception of communications, at least insofar as those principles can be applied to the form of surveillance in question.”