Madam, – For some months now, this newspaper’s technology writer Karlin Lillington has been pursuing an increasingly vocal campaign against the Data Retention Bill.
When I recently indicated my support for this important legislation, I found myself described by Ms Lillington in an article on March 6th as a “conservative” and as having a “PD” perspective on the Bill.
While I’m sure Ms Lillington’s opinions are all very interesting, if not entertaining, I am not certain that they do much to advance public understanding of this issue. Perhaps you will give me space to reply to her criticisms.
The Data Retention Bill would oblige telecoms companies to keep data about the use of their services and to disclose this data to Garda where necessary for a criminal investigation.
We need this legislation for a number of key reasons. Firstly, we are obliged to introduce it by EU Law. In addition, the European Convention for Human Rights requires that where a citizen’s privacy is to be lifted, the criteria for doing so must be spelled out in law. By spelling out conditions and safeguards, the Bill will do just that.
But the most basic reason why the legislation is necessary is that we have a responsibility to equip gardaí with the tools they need to combat serious crime. The fundamental error that is so often made by the civil liberties lobby is to equate human rights in the criminal justice context with suspects’ rights.
That would be a tragic mistake.
The victim of an offence is entitled to an effective investigation by the State as a matter of right – case law under the European Convention of Human Rights tells us that. We would be condoning a further breach of the rights of victims if we failed to give gardaí the powers they need to investigate serious crime. And the Bill will apply only to serious, indictable crime; it will not apply to any offence that can only be prosecuted in the District Court.
New Garda powers do require safeguards, of course, and one of Ms Lillington’s main points about the Bill in a front-page report of February 10th was that it would allow the Minister for Justice to make regulations which she saw as bypassing safeguards. Indeed Ivana Bacik was quoted in that report as saying that such regulations could create “inexplicable gaps in scrutiny”.
But the Bill only provides for regulations to limit the scope of Garda powers, not to extend them. Where regulations are made specifying an offence, there will simply be no Garda powers regarding data retention for that offence. There is no “inexplicable gap in scrutiny”.
Ms Bacik had also called for a suspect to be given the right to know whether they were under investigation. But no such right exists under comparable existing legislation dealing with phone-tapping. That being the case, it would make no sense to give the suspect such a right under the Data Retention Bill. To my mind, Ms Bacik’s call for a suspect’s right to know they are being investigated is ill-conceived because it would seriously compromise the effectiveness of Garda investigations. – Yours, etc,