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Big Brother Awards (BBA) are back in UK with more positive awards to celebrate the people that have been involved in protecting privacy in the past years.

The event, held in December 2008 at the London School of Economics, was organized by the EDRi-member Privacy International and gave only one Big Brother 2008 award - the statue of a boot stamping upon a human head - to the New Labour.

Other six positive prices, called Roll of Honour, were received by:

- Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP - one of the Liberal Democrat Members of the European Parliament, member of the Human Rights Committee;

- Phil Booth, the National Coordinator of the NO2ID Campaign against the Databas

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The fourth edition of Big Brother Awards was announced in the Czech Republic in Prague on 14 November 2008. Under the direction of Czech EDRi-member Iuridicum Remedium, seven worst perpetrators of the right to privacy were awarded. The positive prize was granted to German Working Group on Data Retention AK Vorrat.

The prizes were chosen by an expert jury from more than seventy nominations submitted by the public.

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EFFi (Electronic Frontier Finland) gave out Big Brother Awards for the fifth time in a ceremony held at Helsinki Book Fair on 25 October 2008.

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The ninth edition of the Big Brother Awards Germany ceremony took place on 24 October 2008 in Bielefeld, Germany. The "Oscars for data leeches" event was organized by EDRi-member FoeBuD that gave seven negative awards.

The Big Brother Award 2008 in the "Europe/EU" category went to The Council of the European Union (EU Ministers Council) in Brussels for the EU terror list. On this list, numerous organisations and individual persons have been labelled as "terrorists" and placed under strict sanctions, leading to severe violations of human rights.

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The Italian Big Brother Awards for 2008 were presented on 10 May 2008 during an e-privacy convention in Florence. The Italian jury is formed by 6 jurors who have to vote over 26 nominations, out of which 5 are for the positive award.

The public institution award was received by the Ministry of Economics for its very ample checking instruments. The institution is not the one to prove the citizens are breaking the law, instead it requires the tax payers to prove they are on the right side of the law. With the excuse of fighting tax evasion, the institution has been recently empowered to create mass personal (bank, health etc.) data filing, an obvious and useless violation of the

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On 21 March 2008, Paris was the host of the French Big Brother awards ceremony for the year 2007.

For the second time President Nicolas Sarkozy was excluded from the competition on grounds of "genetic predisposition" for attacks to personal life and freedoms. The jury has reached the conclusion that Mr. Sarkozy's problem must be of genetic source and therefore he should be considered legally "irresponsible" of his repeated acts against private life and fundamental freedoms.

The Constitutional Council received the State award for having validated a new Sarkozy law on "safety imprisonment" which allows for imprisonment of people considered dangerous by experts and not judges.

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On 28 January 2008, the Access to Information Programme and EDRi-member Internet Society Bulgaria presented the Big Brother negative awards.

The Big Brother award was presented to the Ministry of Interior for publishing data from the passports and criminal conviction records of two BBC journalists who were shooting a documentary in Bulgaria.

The Sramota (or Shame diploma) was presented to the Bulgarian Council of Ministers for their decision to publish in the State Gazette of October 2007 the names, permanent addresses and the personal numbers of the owners of land, which were expropriated for the construction of the south road circle in Sofia.

Among the nominees for the anti-award this year were also the Traffic

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A panel of nine experts including journalists and civic associations' members chose the awards for this year BBA winners at the ceremony on 13 November 2007 in Prague, from more than 70 nominations.

The Ministry of Interior of the Czech Republic received the award in the category Lifetime Menace for having ignored basic citizen privacy protection rights in elaborating the National Action Plan of Fighting Terrorism (NAP). During the elaboration process of NAP the Private Data Protection Office was not invited for discussion in issues. The Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data No. 108 of the Council of Europe, adopted by the Czech Republic is not mentioned