This week it was confirmed that the government is to abandon its Coalition Agreement pledge to delete the profiles of more than 1 million innocent people from the national DNA database.
In a letter from the Home Office minister James Brokenshire to MPs, he confirmed that DNA profiles of those arrested but never charged or found guilty of a crime would be retained by forensic science laboratories in an anonymised form. Profiles would “be considered to have been deleted even though the DNA profile record, minus the identification information, will still exist”.
This is a disgraceful u-turn on the part of the government. It represents a betrayal of an explicit commitment made in the Coalition Agreement and stands in contravention of a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights banning the retention of innocent people’s DNA.
Destroying physical DNA samples is a pointless gesture if the computer records are to be retained.
Please do get in touch with your MP and make your views on this issue clear.
In a letter from the Home Office minister James Brokenshire to MPs, he confirmed that DNA profiles of those arrested but never charged or found guilty of a crime would be retained by forensic science laboratories in an anonymised form. Profiles would “be considered to have been deleted even though the DNA profile record, minus the identification information, will still exist”.
This is a disgraceful u-turn on the part of the government. It represents a betrayal of an explicit commitment made in the Coalition Agreement and stands in contravention of a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights banning the retention of innocent people’s DNA.
Destroying physical DNA samples is a pointless gesture if the computer records are to be retained.
Please do get in touch with your MP and make your views on this issue clear.
