The prescription for the speech, on which this chapter is based, asked: what differences do constitutions make to privacy protection? As someone well versed in the practical implications of constitutions, the notice continued, I was to address the question from an international and comparative perspective. I wondered about this claim but I then thought I should draw on various parts of my professional experience, as a public servant, academic, law reformer and judge.

As a legal officer in the New Zealand Department of External Affairs over forty years ago, I analysed the new Canadian Bill of Rights against the proposal for a New Zealand equivalent and I had a hand in the formulating of New Zealand's position on some of the provisions of the draft International Covenants on Human Rights. Next, later in the 1960s, when I was a junior academic at Victoria University of Wellington, human rights issues were prominent in the Law Faculty's public law and international law teaching and writing, including a published series of lectures given in the 20th anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. When I sat as a part-time judge for the first and second times, about twenty years ago, it was in difficult constitutional cases in the Pacific in which legislation was challenged as being in breach of constitutional guarantees of equal protection of the laws.