Title: <i>Asian Data Privacy Laws, Trade and Human Rights Perspective</i>, by Graham Greenleaf
Abstract: The 624-page hardback Asian Data Privacy Laws is a book of its kind I have ever come across since I started to engage myself in the privacy law discourse. The book is written by Graham Greenleaf, a prominent Australian privacy law professor. As a first observation, three key elements make Asian Data Privacy Laws a distinct book hence a must read by policy makers, practitioners, researchers and students of data privacy law not only in Asia but also in other regions of the world. The first element is about the book’s approach and treatment of the subject. Greenleaf deploys a comparative legal research to study national privacy laws of 26 Asian jurisdictions. Indeed, this is the first privacy law book that has covered in detail many national privacy laws. Bygrave cautions that making accurate comparisons of the degree to which given countries or cultures respect privacy is fraught with difficulty—a problem that obviously carries over into comparative assessment of various countries’ legal regimes for privacy and data protection.1 He further argues that such difficulty is partly due to paucity of systematically collected empirical data and partly to the fact that concern for privacy within each country or culture is often uneven.2 Indeed, this caution largely explains the scarcity of comparative privacy law literature across the field of data privacy. Yet, Greenleaf has outlived this caution and it is this feature that makes Asian Data Privacy Laws a distinct book. Secondly, Asian Data Privacy Laws departs from previous privacy law books in many other aspects too. The book does not only focus on the text of the law regulating privacy. Greenleaf has analysed such privacy law taking into account the political, socio-economic and surveillance contexts of each jurisdiction and how these have informed the privacy law reform and its practice. He observes that it is not only national laws that must be given priority in a study of privacy in Asian countries, but also the situation regarding democracy and the rule of law in each country which can overwhelm other consideration (14). The rich empirical evidence supplied to support many arguments raised by the author in this book is another proof that Asian Data Privacy Laws is not only well beyond about law on the book, but also how such law operates in practice. Thirdly, the project that culminates into the publication of the Asian Data Privacy Laws has taken about seven years to complete. This period reflects the complexity of the project which transcends across many jurisdictions with different legal cultures such as Pakistan, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Malaysian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Afghanistan, Nepal and others, and above all the fact that Asian Data Privacy Laws is written by a single author—which is unusual. The lesson that can be drawn here is that writing a comparative law book that covers national jurisdictions in a sub-region/region is not an easy job. It requires an author to develop reliable research contacts in different jurisdictions to help collection of data, giving updates and providing translation where necessary; where possible make field trips to the research destinations; be conversant with comparative legal research method skills; etc. The acknowledgement section of Asian Data Privacy Laws clearly demonstrates the author’s greatest efforts to overcome the barriers of comparative legal research in the realm of privacy law.
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-07-12
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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