"The first and foremost harmonising influence emanating from the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms is, in any event, the requirement that any invasion of privacy for a legitimate reason (for purposes of criminal investigation, usually the prevention of crime) must have a basis in law, and that law – be it case law or statue – must be of a certain quality: foreseeable (sufficiently detailed) and accessible and providing remedies for the citizen. While in civil legal systems and culture it is regarded as self-evident that interference with the individual citizen by the state requires an explicit basis in law, common law systems take the opposite view: everything is allowed unless forbidden. It will be seen, therefore, that the European Convention requires of the United Kingdom a substantial cultural “volte face”,19 at least as far as the rules governing police powers are concerned. But the states of continental Europe too, have been required to bring their procedural rules up to the quality standards that the European Court demands. But what if the restrictions on the right of privacy are to be found in substantive law, so that criminalisation is the obstacle to the exercise of the right to privacy and therefore not procedure but the moral basis of criminal law is the contentious issue. If interference by the state is justified by a commonly agreed criminal policy, such as exists in the shadow of the third pillar of the European Union with regard to organised crime, money laundering, migration and a number of other matters, there will be few problems with the legitimacy of far-reaching police powers (provided they meet procedural norms) or the provisions fo substantive law needed in order to realise that policy. It is where a right to respect for private life is equated with an individual right of autonomy that intractable questions arise. Here, Article 8 (2) of the Convention appears to make allowances for what the European Court of Human Rights calls the “moral climate” of a given society, for it cintemplayes the justification of regulation by a nation state of “morals”. Now, whatever “morals” may mean in this context (and it is an exceedingly hazy concept), the protection of morals as a legitimate aim of state intervention appears not only in Article 8(2), but also in Articles 9(2), 10(2) and 11(2). In any event, it is clear that we are not only talking about sexual morality, although most such cases with which the European Court deals concern sex in some way or another (and many involve the United Kingdom - “no sex please, we're British”).20 Taken together with the toher requirement, that however legitimate the aim “in abstracto”, intervention must also be necessary in a given democratic society, we must surmise that this has something to do with holding together the (moral) fabric of society, if necessary by criminalising autonomous individual behaviour that threatens it. There are any number of exceedingly problematic issues here."