International Law

Counter-Terrorism Bill - DNA and Data Sharing by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ - no more Duty of Confidentiality or the Wilson Doctrine ?

The Labour Government's latest terrorism legislation got an unopposed Second Reading in the House of Commons on Tuesday 1st April 2008. The Opposition parties and the media, as we predicted when the Bill was announced, have been distracted by the extremely controversial 42 days internment without charge provisions and have, so far, ignored all the other sneaky and repressive bits of the Bill.

The text of the Counter-Terrorism Bill 2008 and th (not very) Explanatory Notes is available on the Parliament website.

Where is the Business Case and the Regulatory impact Assessment setting out why such further legislation is actually necessary, why the existing vast legal powers available under the large amount of existing Primary and Secondary legislation is somehow inadequate, how much extra this is all going tocost to enforrced, and what the expected result will be in terms of the number of terrorists who will be caught, convicted or even slightly deterred. Neither the Explanatory Notes, nor any of the media spin and manipulation so far presented to the public have made any of this clear.

There appears to be a carte blanche for legally covering up any of DNA or fingerprint sample abuses "that are not held subject to existing statutory restrictions."

The Bill also provides for the use of DNA samples and for fingerprinting to be used not just for terrorism cases , not just for serious crime, not just for petty crime, bute for general "identification" purposes, whether you are dead or alive.

There also seems to be another statutory attempt to destroy the Common Law Duty of Confidentiality, and probably also to circumvent the "Wilson Doctrine".

Any legislation which claims that "Nothing in that section shall be read as casting doubt on the legality of anything done by any of the intelligence services before that section came into force." only succeeds in raising precisely those sort of doubts in the mind of anyone reading it.

Full post as published by Spy Blog on April 03, 2008 (boomark / email).