DNA Collection and Human Rights
In a judgement in December 2008, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that two British men should not have had their DNA and fingerprints retained by police saying that retention "could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society".
The DNA fingerprinting pioneer Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys condemned UK government plans to keep the genetic details of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in England and Wales for up to 12 years. Jeffreys said he was "disappointed" with the proposals, which came after a European court ruled that the current policy breaches people's right to privacy. Jefferys said "It seems to be as about as minimal a response to the European court of human rights judgment as one could conceive. There is a presumption not of innocence but of future guilt here … which I find very disturbing indeed".
Read more about this topic: National DNA Database
Famous quotes containing the words dna, collection, human and/or rights:
“Here [in London, history] ... seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“It’s rather grisly, isnt it, how soon a living man becomes nothing more than a collection of stocks and bonds and debts and real estate?”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The line that I am urging as today’s conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, a repudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“This is no war for domination or imperial aggrandisement or material gain.... It is a war ... to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man.”
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)