Government To Continue Keeping DNA Profiles

[Mark Hanson]

Despite manifesto pledges by both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and the claim by the Coalition to be doing more for civil liberties than any previous government, the Tory-led Coalition has decided that it will permit the storage, indefinitely, of innocent person's DNA profiles.

Although the actual DNA samples will be destroyed, and the profiles "anonymised", it will still remain possible for a profile to be matched against a name.  How this counts as "anonymised" is unclear, as the person/DNA match still exists.

The policy of bringing in the Scottish model, which complies both with UK and European Human Rights laws, has, according to Cranmer (see: Another Cameron U-turn on DNA), been abandoned in a startling U-turn that puts the current Government in the category of "threat to civil freedoms" rather than "defender of civil freedoms".

[Mark Hanson]

Further news on this:

The proposal is that although the DNA profiles will not be stored in the central database, they will remain at individual forensic facilities.  It is currently unclear whether this is an attempted workaround of the European Court of Human Rights 2008 ruling (which ruled that the current Government scheme broke the European Convention on Human Rights), or a sincere aspect of practicality (the Government claims that these profiles are stored in mixed batches, with a batch containing both innocent and convicted persons' DNA, thereby making deletion difficult and, they claim, impractical).

There are, however, some serious concerns that the DNA of large numbers of innocent people will potentially remain available to the State and it's agents.