UK Judge Wants DNA Base for All
LONDON (AP) – All British citizens and every visitor to the country should be included on the national DNA database, which is already the world’s largest, a senior British judge said Wednesday. Lord Justice Stephen Sedley said the current database of nearly 4 million is insufficient, and that ethnic minorities are disproportionately included. “We have a situation where if you happen to have been in the hands of the police, then your DNA is on permanent record. If you haven’t, it isn’t. … That’s broadly the picture,” Sedley said in an interview with British Broadcasting Corp. “It also means that a great many people who are walking the streets, and whose DNA would show them guilty of crimes, go free.” Former Prime Minister Tony Blair suggested last year that the database should include all Britons.
Britain’s database contains DNA samples from 5.2 percent of the nation’s people. The United States, by contrast, has 0.5 percent of the population on its DNA database, according to the Home Office. Richard Thomas, the government’s information commissioner, said a debate was needed on problems in the system. The database, he noted, now includes samples from 9 percent of white males but 40 percent of black males. However, he was cautious about moving to a universal database. “This approach can be very intrusive. It raises really fundamental questions about how much the state or the police know about each of us. There are risks of errors or mistakes,” Thomas told the BBC.
Sedley said there were “very serious but manageable implications” of a universal database, which he said should be used “for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention.” Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil liberties group Liberty, said the debate about expanding the database “reveals just how casual some people have become about the value of personal privacy.” “A database of those convicted of sexual and violent crime is a perfectly sensible crime-fighting measure,” Chakrabarti said. “A database of every man, woman and child in the country is a chilling proposal, ripe for indignity, error and abuse.”
