Via Spyblog, I see that the DNA database has taken a thumping through the auspices of the European Court of Human rights.
Two British men should not have had their DNA and fingerprints retained by police, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.
The men’s information was held by South Yorkshire Police, although neither was convicted of any offence.
This is fantastic news. The thoroughly egregious practice of storing the DNA profiles of innocent people has now been declared illegal. I trust now that those profiles will now be destroyed.
The judgement could have major implications on how DNA records are stored in the UK’s national database.
The judges said keeping the information “could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society”.
Indeed so, there is no place in a democracy for such retention. It is a shame that it should come to a judgment by the ECHR to instruct the UK parliament in what it should have done in the first instance.
Hopefully, this will be a suitably large nail in the coffin of any ideas about putting us all on such a database.
“Hopefully, this will be a suitably large nail in the coffin of any ideas about putting us all on such a database.” You think?
Using the Humpty Dumpty logic of NuLabour they will see this as an instruction for them to go for the national database so there is no discrimination between the innocent and guilty.
The Great Simpletons last blog post..What would George or Betty have done?
I was being optimistic…
I note that Jackboots Jacqui is insisting that the present law remains in place while they
find a way round this “unfortunate” judgementconsider the judgement.I will wager whatever £10 is worth in 12 months that there will be a determined drive to get it through the European Council of Ministers policy laundry machine and become a “treaty obligation”.
This is excellent news. I don’t think that the government will respond by a law to put everyone on the DNA database. For two reasons – one practical and one legal. The practical reason is it would be extremely unpopular and would generate large scale civil disobedience. Labour may be unscrupulpous authoritarians but even more, they want to win the next election. The reason why Labour has been building the database by stealth is because it knows how unpopular a universal database is. The legal reason is that the ECHR judgement was in two parts. The second part said that the UK policies were disproportionate, which I think precludes the extension of the database to everyone. No, I think Labour is fucked on this one.
Correction to my last post, after studying the ruling properly. The ruling was based wholly on article 8, the right to privacy, and not article 14, which relates to discrimination. This is very good news as a decision under article 14 would have allowed the government the option to implement a universal database. It is as good a ruling as we could have wished for 🙂