Via the Canadian Privacy Law Blog, news that the European Court of Human Rights has ruled (in Reklos and Davourlis v Greece) that a minor's right to respect for "private life" was violated when a hospital hired a photographer to take pictures of a baby without first obtaining the consent of the parents and then also refusing to give possession of the negatives to the parents.
The decision itself is available here (only in French).
The press release (in English), which includes a description of the facts of the case, is available here.
The privacy right which was violated is contained in Article 8(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights:
Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
That right is subject to the limits contained in Article 8(2):
There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
No similar decision is possible in Canada pursuant to the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms (which doesn't recognize an explicit right to privacy), but the ECHR decision is very similar to that in the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Aubry v. Éditions Vice‑Versa, [1998] 1 S.C.R. 591, which recognized that the right of privacy accorded pursuant to section 5 of the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms includes a right of control over the use of one's image, even if, as in Aubry, that image is photographed in a public place:
The right to one’s image is an element of the right to privacy under s. 5 of the Quebec Charter. If the purpose of the right to privacy is to protect a sphere of individual autonomy, it must include the ability to control the use made of one’s image. There is an infringement of a person’s right to his or her image and, therefore, fault as soon as the image is published without consent and enables the person to be identified.
In Canadian jurisdictions outside Quebec, I'm not aware of any similar decision based on their provincial privacy statutes (the existence and extent of coverage of which varies from province to province) (though certainly the wording of some of the statutes is broad enough to contemplate a similar result), and no similar decision could be made under PIPEDA.
UPDATE: I should probably clarify what it is that is so, to use an imprecise term, radical about the ECHR decision from the standpoint of Canadian law (outside of Quebec): the breach of the privacy right is evidently not predicated on a "commercial use" - in other words, it appears to have been the taking of the photograph itself, and not any subsequent use of the photograph, which violated the privacy right.
