Ms Sylvia Lim (Workers’ Party—Aljunied GRC) expressed a number of concerns over the Registration of Criminals (Amendment) Bill, which was passed in Parliament on Monday (Sept 12).
Ms Lim joined the Singapore Police Force in 1991 for three years as a police inspector. In her career as a lawyer in the years that followed, she worked on both civil and criminal cases in the High Court, Subordinate Courts, and Juvenile Court, and raised a number of concerns as well.
She noted that because the Bill proposed to include less serious offences, “this raises the question of what the appropriate threshold should be to justify collection of DNA from individuals, simply for the database.
In other jurisdictions, this has sparked discussion about the balance between the public interest in securing evidence to prove or disprove guilt, versus the public interest in ensuring that private individuals are protected from unwarranted interference.
These questions should not be dismissed as unimportant.”
The WP chair acknowledged that while the Bill “widens significantly the state’s powers to collect DNA from individuals. However, we see some attempt to limit the scope of the state’s powers,” which she says she supports.
But on the issue of volunteers giving their DNA samples, she asked how this would operate in practice, “whether vulnerable groups may be pressured to provide blood samples thinking that they have no choice but to ‘volunteer’?”
“With the expanded powers to collect body samples from just about anybody who volunteers, what safeguards will be in place to ensure that vulnerable groups are not picked on and that the consent of volunteers is informed and freely given?” Ms Lim added.
As she ended her speech, she sounded “a note of caution” about the limitations of DNA profiling, noting that the samples taken from crime scenes are often incomplete, which raises the possibility of many matches instead of a narrow field, as well as the risk of contamination in crime scenes.
“It is a fact that there have been miscarriages of justice in other jurisdictions involving DNA evidence, such as wrongful convictions due to mix-ups in the laboratories handling the DNA.
The relevant agencies including the courts should also be mindful not to regard DNA evidence as infallible, but assess it in the light of other evidence, so as to minimise the risk of wrongful convictions.”
WP chief and Leader of the Opposition Pritam Singh had said earlier in the session that the WP supports the Bill, which expands the police’s DNA database by including less serious crimes under its scope, with those investigated for registrable crimes and less serious eligible crimes expected to surrender their DNA to the authorities.
Examples of registrable crimes are murder, rape, and robbery, while voluntarily causing hurt is an example of a less serious crime.
The Ministry of Home Affairs had said that the Bill would improve the investigative capabilities of the police.
Mr Singh, however, voiced concerns and sought clarifications over a number of aspects of the Bill, including the security of the DNA that would be surrendered in the event of a cyberattack.
He cited the 2018 SingHealth cybersecurity breach, wherein the personal information of 1.5 Singaporeans was hacked. /TISG