Investigating human rights 3. Investigating human rights 3.1 Federal Chancellery Typographically correct rendering of surname deemed proper under Federal Constitution For years, the AOB has been advocating changes to ensure that diacritical marks are displayed and stored by the software and hardware used in public administration so that the correct spelling of names is possible. Section 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) stipulates the right to private and family life that is guaranteed under the Austrian Federal Constitution. Considering the relevant case law of both the Constitutional Court of Austria and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) (see Collection of decisions of the Austrian Constitutional Court 13.661/1994 and 15.031/1997 as well as the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in the “Burghartz”, case of 22 February 1994, and in the “Stjerna” and “Guillot”, cases of 25 November 1994 and 24 October 1996 respectively), there can be no doubt that the right to respect for one’s private life also comprises a right to respect of one’s own name that is guaranteed under the Austrian Federal Constitution. Fundamental right to respect of one‘s own name Viewed from a constitutional perspective, one must ask whether the protected area of the right to have one’s own name respected also comprises the right that one’s first and last names must be rendered by the authorities in a way that is typographically correct. As the AOB already set out in detail in its Annual Report 2007, there are very weighty arguments for answering this question in the affirmative. Therefore, in a meeting of the entire Board in December 2007, the AOB decided that the absence of appropriate measures to correctly store and display diacritical marks in the software and hardware used by the Bundesrechenzentrum GmbH (i.e. the IT provider for federal departments in Austria) is to be qualified as maladministration. To eliminate this maladministration, a recommendation was sent to the Federal Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor to change how diacritical marks are stored and displayed by the software and hardware and to ensure in a gradual process that names are spelled correctly. AOB advocates typographically correct rendering of names As a reaction to this recommendation, the Federal Chancellery admitted that the entire range of characters that can be displayed in UTF-8 (8 Bit Unicode Transformation Format) currently cannot be displayed in the electronic record system. However, the electronic record system is supposed to be modified in such a way that diacritical marks can be stored, displayed and Enormous need for action on part of the federal administration 53