Home Ministry Notifies Law Empowering Cops To Obtain Convicts’ Biometrics
The law would enable investigating officers to collect the biometric details of prisoners.
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The Central government on Monday, 19 September, notified the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill, 2022, which would enable investigating officers to collect the biometric details of prisoners.
The law was passed by the Parliament in April this year.
Apart from providing legal sanction to the police to obtain physical and biological samples of convicts and detainees for investigation in criminal matters, the law also empowers a magistrate to order the documenting of measurements or photographs of a person to aid the probe of an offence.
What the Bill Proposes
While the Prisoners Act authorises the collection of certain identifiable information about specified persons (such as convicts for the purposes of investigation of a crime), the current Bill looks to expand the ambit of both the information (identification markers) to be collected, as well as the persons from whom this information can be extracted.
It proposes to allow the police and prison authorities to collect, store, and analyse physical and biological samples, including the retina and iris scans of not only the convicts, but also of those that the police consider suspects of a crime.
The Bill also authorises the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) to collect, store, and preserve these details for 75 years.
SOPs for Data Storage
The NCRB, which functions under the home ministry, will issue the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) which may include the specifications of the equipments or devices to be used for taking measurements, specifications, and format, including digital or physical, of the measurements to be taken and the method of handling and their storage in the database at the state level.
Any act of unauthorised access, distribution, or sharing of the data collected under the Act shall be punishable as per the provisions of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, and under the Information Technology Act, 2000, PTI reported.
'Data of Political Detainees Would Not Be Collected': Home Minister Amit Shah
Union Home Minister Amit Shah, in the debate on the legislation in the Rajya Sabha, had said that the biometric data of political detainees would not be collected and the proposed law would exclude brain mapping and polygraph tests from its ambit, news agency PTI had reported.
"Under Section 3, the government of India has the right to make rules. We will define it and ensure that no person involved in a political agitation has to give (physical and biometric) measurements only for political agitation," he said.
"But if a political leader is arrested in a criminal case, then he will have to be at par with a citizen," Shah added.
Why It Is Concerning
The Bill seeks legal sanctions to "measure" a convict's biometrics. Following the introduction of the Bill, legal experts and activists had voiced a slew of privacy-related concerns about its provisions. These concerns largely pertain to the following aspects of the Bill:
Expansion of identification characteristics
Expansion of the categories of people the data will be gathered from
Collection and storage of this information with the NCRB
(With inputs from PTI.)
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