Ex-post control 3.2 Federal Chancellery 3.2.1 Fundamental rights Correct spelling of surnames with diacritic letters is a requirement of the Federal Constitution For years, the AOB has been lobbying for a change to the software and hardware used by administration to save and display diacritic characters so as to allow surnames to be spelled correctly. Right to respect for own name Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) contains a right by order of the Federal Constitution to respect private and family life. In light of the relevant legislation by the Constitutional Court and European Court of Human Rights (see Collection of decisions of the Austrian Constitutional Court 13.661/1994 and 15.031/1997 as well as the rulings by the European Court of Human Rights in the case “Burghartz” dated 22 February 1994 and the cases “Stjerna” and “Guillot” dated 25 November 1994 and 24 October 1996), there can be no doubt that the right to respect for private life also comprises the right to respect for one’s name by order of the Federal Constitution. This then raises the question under the Federal Constitution whether the scope of protection of the right to respect for one’s own name also includes the right for first and surnames to be spelled correctly by the authorities. AOB demands correct spelling of names As the AOB reported in detail in its Annual Report of 2007, substantial arguments can be presented in favour of answering this question in the affirmative. In December 2007, the members of the AOB therefore unanimously agreed that a failure to take suitable measures to save and present diacritic characters correctly with the software and hardware used by the Federal Computing Centre must be qualified as a deficit in administration. A letter was sent to the Federal Chancellery to rectify this deficit, recommending that the software and hardware used by the Federal Computing Centre should be adjusted to allow diacritic characters to be saved and displayed and surnames to be spelled correctly (in steps). Need for action across federal administration The Federal Chancellery responded to this recommendation by stating that all characters of the format UTF-8 (8 Bit Unicode Transformation Format) cannot currently be displayed in the Federal Electronic Records Management System. However, the Federal Electronic Records Management System is to be modified so that diacritic characters can be saved, displayed and used in notifications in the future. In addition, the current problem was discussed repeatedly at information and communication technology meetings where the individual federal ministries also presented specific implementation plans. 40