Comment: DNA database
Comment: DNA database
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Today the Queen announced the government's plan to make a more responsive justice system for victims, witnesses, and the wider public.
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Thursday, 04, Dec 2008 12:00
Ian Dunt
Today, the European court of human rights ruled the British policy of keeping innocent people's details on the DNA database illegal. It has no right of appeal.
Today's judgement didn’t so much prove the British government's argument wrong. It simply approached it from a different direction. 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. If you look at the Home Office argument in more detail it is quite clear where it goes.
If the test of the policy's validity is the potential for solving future crimes, then there is no reason not to put everyone on the database. In fact, there would be no reason not to add all British citizens from birth.
And that, ultimately, was what the government intended. This is a government that fundamentally misunderstands the privilege it is to be born in this country, to be born free of state interference in your personal business. Undoubtedly, a universal database would make solving crime easier. But at what price? The Home Office no longer asks such questions. It is motivated only by what works. Anything that gets in the way is just an obstacle to efficiency.
One might have at least wished the government to be honest about what it was doing. Instead of making the case for a universal database so it could be debated in public, it chose to slip it in by stealth. Previously, innocent people's DNA was removed after acquittal (or if the case was dropped). But very quietly, the government slipped a clause into the Serious Organised Crime and Policing Act 2005 which allowed for the DNA to be retained.
It's typical of the way New Labour acts on fundamental issues of British rights. Yesterday saw similar manoeuvres in the upcoming immigration bill. Instead of putting the argument for ID cards to the public, it expanded a power to check identity documents at ports of entry across the country and made it applicable to anyone who had ever entered Britain – basically any Brit who ever took a holiday. For the government to fundamentally alter British people's rights by sneakily adapting a bill ostensibly just for non-UK citizens betrays a thoroughly disreputable attitude to the public.
Happy as we must be at the loss of this terrible policy – and it will now surely fall, whatever the brave face home secretary Jacqui Smith puts on it today – we should feel ashamed at how it has come about. It is pitiful that we should need the Europeans to tell us what any five year old child would realise – that the database, in its current form, is a massive affront to our privacy.
Law Lords addressed this case once and threw it out, sending the two men who brought today's claim to Strasbourg. In doing so they failed to represent the law, as stipulated in the European convention of human rights (in truth, the only privacy legislation in British law). They also failed to represent the British people.