Habeas Data vs the European Data Protection Directive

This paper is mostly an update on an article that first appeared in the Journal of Information Law and Technology (JILT) regarding the relatively recent legal figure of Habeas Data, which has been implemented in some countries in Latin America. The need to update the original article arose from the fact that there have been many new developments regarding the implementation of this legal tool in Latin America, and because of some other interesting developments in the European Union that required that some of the original conclusions be revisited and amended. This paper was first presented in the 16th Annual Conference of the British and Irish Legal Education and Technology Association (BILETA) in April 2001, my thanks to the attendants for their input, which helped in revising the present work. The paper has many sections that are similar to the original, with the intention of making the update a stand-alone document. A shorter two-part version of the paper appeared in the World Data Protection Report.