The UK Supreme Court will eventually have to pass judgment on the compliance of the legal and policy framework for ‘criminality information sharing’ with the stipulations of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and perhaps in relation to more than one area of practice within public protection work. Parliament should recognise that there is a groundswell of judicial (and academic) opinion which suggests that, if the current legal framework regulating the sharing of information for the purposes of public protection is lawful, even in the face of criticism from the European Court of Human Rights, then an intolerable level of uncertainty as to the issue of that legality has now been reached. This paper addresses the root causes of this legal uncertainty, and argues for statutory reform to revisit even recent tinkering with the law in this area. In an overview of both a body of common law, in the form of a series of key decisions from the courts, as well as the tensions between two tracts of legislation, promoting public protection and human rights values occasionally at odds with one another, this piece examines the crucial issue of the retention of criminality information and the idea of individual (offender) consultation over its use in public protection work. </jats:p
