Closing Remarks

In the name of all those who had the privilege to listen to today's enlightening lectures and discussion, I should like to express our gratitude both to our guests from abroad and to the Israeli participants for their valuable contribution to the illumination of problems connected with the relationship between computerized data-collecting and the law. As was stressed by Chief Justice Shamgar, Erwin Shimron was very much interested in questions of mutual interaction between the progress of social life and legal development. May I, as a retired teacher of constitutional law, ask your permission to refer briefly, in these concluding remarks, to the crucial issue of the protection of privacy in the computer age. The need to protect privacy is deeply rooted in the respect for human dignity, the highest and most fundamental of all values in the civilized world. Considering then the close link between the private sphere of the individual and the very essence of human dignity, we have to attach the greatest importance to the task of protecting the private sphere in the relationship between State and individual and among individuals themselves.