Genetic information from innocent people cannot be kept on a police criminal database, a European court ruled today. The UK government has been told that its policy of refusing to remove DNA information from a massive centralised database when a suspect has been exonerated breaches human rights.
The European Court of Human Rights said the right to respect and a private life would be “unacceptably weakened if the use of modern scientific techniques in the criminal justice system were allowed at any cost and without carefully balancing the potential benefits of the extensive use of such techniques against important private-life interests” (Guardian).
Before the ruling, the Daily Telegraph noted that if the UK government lost the case more than 850,000 people on the database could have their records wiped. All of these hundreds of thousands of people do not have criminal records. The number includes 40,000 children.
However the UK’s home secretary Jacqui Smith has defended the policy of keeping genetic information on thousands of innocent men, women and children against their will.
“DNA and fingerprinting is vital to the fight against crime, providing the police with more than 3,500 matches a month,” says Smith, who failed to cite any evidence that keeping the samples helps fight crime (Sky).
On the Politics.co.uk site, Ian Dunt writes:
The Home Office argues that DNA samples can be useful in solving later crimes. The court hasn’t commented on the validity of that claim. It’s irrelevant. British people’s rights are not subject to making life easier for police. They are subject to what is morally right – to the privacy of the individual in the face of an over-eager state.
The truth is the policy was grossly intrusive and profoundly unethical. It broke a central tenant of British life: that subjects are entitled to privacy and freedom unless they break the law.
The DNA database website itself asks the question “Why are people who have not been convicted on the database?” It supplies this answer (reproduced in total):
Before 2001, the police could take DNA samples during investigations but had to destroy the samples and the records derived from them on the Database if the people concerned were acquitted or charges were not proceeded with.
The law was changed in 2001 to remove this requirement, and changed again in 2004 so that DNA samples could be taken from anyone arrested for a recordable offence and detained in a police station.
To me that seems more of a ‘how’ rather than a ‘why’. If anyone can supply a convincing argument as to why any government should be keeping genetic information on thousands of innocent men, women and children against their will please leave it below. I have yet to hear one from Jacqui Smith or anyone else in the UK’s government.
Image: Getty