The changing ground of human rights

How can competing human rights be balanced?

The information age, characterized by the soaring spread of the Internet, on one hand, raises the awareness of human rights protection among the public - online judgments, public hearing videos and other legal materials facilitate people's access to the legal world and establish more channels for international judicial cooperation. On the other, it gives birth to unprecedented problems - the once peacefully coexisting rights become irreconcilable under certain situations today.

How to strike a fair balance between the competing human rights, such as the right to know (namely, the right to access information) and the right to not to be known (the right to personal data protection), the right to say (namely, the freedom of expression) and the right to privacy becomes an inevitable task confronting us.

Elisabeth Steiner is a judge at the European Court of Human Rights.