Abstract
The first paragraph of Article 13 of the Constitution of Japan (hereinafter “Article 13”) stipulates the principles that all people are respected as individuals, which requires the public authorities to ensure individual dignity and personal autonomy. The second paragraph of Article 13 requires that public authorities strike the right balance between the supreme consideration of the right to the pursuit of happiness and ensuring public welfare. In the context of protection of privacy, these requirements prevent governments from excessively intervening in the sphere of individual private lives and from handling personal information in an undue manner. Thus, the right not to be interfered with in the sphere of individual private life and the right to protection of personal information by public authorities will be ensured as subjective rights under Article 13. However, these rights differ from the rights to control self-information, which presuppose the control over a variety of information handling processes including collection, analysis and disclosure of information. Given that it is almost impossible for people to physically control their self-information in this age and that it is difficult to properly delineate the range of self-information, the rights to control selfinformation cannot be regarded as a fundamental right under Article 13. In the meantime, it should be noted that the right to the pursuit of happiness is supplementary to other respective fundamental rights. Thus, it is too early to conclude that the foundation of the right to privacy is in Article 13 without analyzing other articles to stipulate fundamental rights relevant to privacy in the Constitution of Japan.
