Today, RSI urged MPs to support significant amendments to the Data Protection and Digital Information (No. 2) Bill.
Clauses 26-28 (previously clauses 24-26) of the Bill, if enacted, would give the Home Secretary great and unaccountable powers to authorise the police to violate our privacy rights, through the use of ‘national security certificates’ and ‘designation notices’.
Under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the UK government must ensure that everything it does, including in the name of national security, complies with human rights laws. This means it must make sure that any time it interferes with the privacy of people in the UK, it obeys the law, has a goal that is legitimate in a democratic society, and only does what is truly necessary to achieving that goal.
We argue that as currently drafted, clauses 26-28 fall foul of the UK’s obligations under the ECHR because they give the Home Secretary discretion that is too broad, and because they do not create sufficient safeguards to prevent their misuse. Under the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, laws that give unfettered or overly broad discretion to the government to interfere with privacy will violate the Convention because the laws must be sufficiently specific to prevent abuses of power. The Court has repeatedly stressed that this is what the ‘rule of law’ means and that it is an essential principle of democracy.
Despite multiple requests from MPs and RSI, the government has also failed to explain why it believes these clauses are necessary to safeguarding national security. So far, it has only explained why these new powers would be ‘helpful’ or would ensure greater ‘efficiency’ – but those justifications do not meet the standard the ECHR requires when the government wants to interfere with our privacy. The government is not entitled to do anything it finds ‘helpful’.
For these reasons, we urge MPs to support amendments 226, 227 and 228. These will remove clauses 26-28 from the Bill.
