Nadzór wzrokowy osoby: kwestia legalności
Visual surveillance of a person: the legality issue

Summary/Abstract: The relevance of the study stems from the legal ambiguity surrounding specificaspects of visual surveillance utilised by law enforcement agencies, journalists, private de-tectives, and other individuals with a need for it. The purpose of the study is to identifyindicators that can differentiate between legal and illegal covert visual surveillance of indi-viduals in public spaces, to establish the circumstances under which such surveillance shouldbe deemed a criminal offence, define the specific aspects of documenting this offence, andexplore methods of proving the guilt of those responsible. Historical-legal, formal-legal,logical-normative, logical-semantic, sociological and statistical research methods are appliedin the study. The criteria for the legality of covert visual surveillance of a person in pub-licly accessible places are: its conduct by authorised subjects (investigators or employees ofoperational units), implementation only within the framework of criminal proceedings (orproceedings in an intelligence gathering case), the existence of a decision of the investigatingjudge on permission to conduct visual surveillance of a specific person, strict compliancewith the requirements of the Criminal Procedure Law regarding the procedure for con-ducting visual surveillance and restrictions established by the decision of the investigatingjudge. It is found that representatives of civilian professions can conduct visual surveillancein publicly accessible places only in an open way. Covert visual surveillance of a personto collect information about them constitutes a criminal offence consisting in violation ofprivacy. To bring illegal observers to criminal responsibility, factual data indicating thepurpose of visual surveillance (collecting confidential information about a person), motives,time, place, means of committing the crime, and other circumstances are collected duringthe pre-trial investigation. The practical value of the paper is the possibility of using theobtained data to prevent illegal actions of private detectives, journalists, and other entitieswho secretly collect information about a person through visual surveillance, and to ensureeffective investigation of such activities.

• Details
• Contents