The federal government must promote a specialized law to protect, safeguard and cancel personal data contained in the National Registry of Missing or Unidentified Persons, the National Registry of Deceased and Unidentified Persons, as well as in the National Bank of Forensic Data, to avoid its inappropriate use.
That was a conclusion of the academic from the Department of Law of the Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México, Diego Garcia Ricci, in his study “Privacy and forensic identification of missing persons: Legal analysis on the exchange of personal data for human identification purposes”, which was funded by the Program for Strengthening the Rule of Law in Mexico of the German Cooperation for Sustainable Development ( GIZ).
He recalled that as a measure to face the serious crisis of disappearances that the country is experiencing, the General Law on Forced Disappearance of Persons, Disappearance Committed by Individuals and of the National Person Search System, allows the exchange of information between authorities of the databases and registries strictly to attend the search of the more than 94,00 people not located in our country, or the identification of bodies.
He stressed that in the process of searching or identifying a person, a family member must provide the authorities with details of the person’s private life, such as nationality, schooling, if they have tattoos, hobbies, family members and social networks.
The General Law obliges the search commissions to consult, periodically and exhaustively, the databases or records of hospitals, clinics, psychological care centers, detention and detention centers, forensic medical services, shelters and pantheons, as well as request information from the authorities on the issuance of driver’s licenses; Voter’s credential, military card and granting of social programs.
“When a search commission makes a query to the databases of these institutions, it would be carrying out an intrusion of the privacy of someone, because it could be knowing some aspect of the private life of the disappeared person that is not public knowledge ”, Explained the study by academic Diego García.
He warned that the General Law on Personal Data does not indicate how long the information will be kept in the records, nor does it establish the way in which family members can exercise their rights of access, rectification, cancellation or opposition to the processing of personal data (arc rights) in front of that database of genetic information. “This opens up the possibility that their genetic data remains stored indefinitely, which, certainly, could be excessive and disproportionate, “he said.
For this reason, he said that “at some point we will have to create a specialized law that imposes much clearer rules on how the processing of this personal data will be carried out, but that guarantees the relatives of the disappeared, to the extent possible, their power to decide when they would like to stop sharing all that personal data that they have had to share with the State in order to find one of their loved ones ”.
In one of his conclusions, the author of the study determined that there is currently no difficulty between authorities to access the databases in an expeditious and timely manner to locate or identify non-located persons.
However, he wondered why, if neither privacy nor the protection of personal data are being an obstacle, why the number of missing persons and unidentified bodies has not stopped increasing.
“Something prevents the flow of information even though the General Law on Forced Disappearance authorizes it.”
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx