Part V of the Police Act 1997, yet to be brought into force, contains provisions relating to certificates of criminal records. Health professional' is widely defined in section 69. The organisation will be technically outside the jurisdiction of the English courts and, if the requirement is imposed through a Consul, he should be able to rely on diplomatic immunity. Consultation Paper on the EC Data Protection Directive , at 30. Unlike the Data Protection Directive and the 1998 Act, there were no specific provisions in the 1984 Act in relation to processing for such purposes.
Regard is to be had to the special importance of the public interest in freedom of expression.
This must be taken to be a far-reaching public interest. They would have been unlikely to submit themselves to the vagaries and uncertainty of a libel action otherwise. However, recital 16 limits the scope of this by excluding processing such as video surveillance is carried out for the purposes of public security, defence, national security or State activities relating to criminal law or other activities outside the scope of Community law. The very wide definition of 'processing' will cover virtually any operation with the image data. A possible limitation is if the data are not processed automatically.