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Content type: Report
Privacy International partnered with the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School to guide the reader through a simple presentation of the legal arguments explored by national courts around the world who have been tasked with national courts that discuss the negative implications of identity systems, particularly on human rights, and to present their judgement.
This argumentation guide seeks to fill that gap by providing a clear, centralised source of the arguments advanced in…
Content type: Report
Many countries in the world have existing ID cards - of varying types and prevalence - there has been a new wave in recent years of state “digital identity” initiatives.
The systems that states put in place to identify citizens and non-citizens bring with them a great deal of risks.
This is particularly the case when they involve biometrics - the physical characteristics of a person, like fingerprints, iris scans, and facial photographs.
Activists and civil society organisations around the…
Content type: Report
A common theme of all major pieces of national jurisprudence analyzing the rights implications of national identity system is an analysis of the systems’ impacts on the right to privacy.
The use of any data by the State including the implementation of an ID system must be done against this backdrop with respect for all fundamental human rights. The collection of data to be used in the system and the storage of data can each independently implicate privacy rights and involve overlapping and…
Content type: Report
Identity systems frequently rely on the collection and storage of biometric data during system registration, to be compared with biometric data collected at the point of a given transaction requiring identity system verification.
While courts have arguably overstated the effectiveness and necessity of biometric data for identity verification in the past, the frequency of biometric authentication failure is frequently overlooked. These failures have the potential to have profoundly…
Content type: Report
National identity systems naturally implicate data protection issues, given the high volume of data necessary for the systems’ functioning.
This wide range and high volume of data implicates raises the following issues:
consent as individuals should be aware and approve of their data’s collection, storage, and use if the system is to function lawfully. Despite this, identity systems often lack necessary safeguards requiring consent and the mandatory nature of systems ignores consent…
Content type: Report
While identity systems pose grave dangers to the right to privacy, based on the particularities of the design and implementation of the ID system, they can also impact upon other fundamental rights and freedoms upheld by other international human rights instruments including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Right and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights such as the right to be free from unlawful discrimination, the right to liberty, the right to…
Content type: Report
Rather than providing a list of arguments, as is the case in the other sections of this guide, the fifth section provides a general overview describing the absence of consideration of these themes in existing jurisprudence and the reasons why these themes warrant future consideration including identity systems’ implications for the rule of law, the role of international human rights law, and considerations of gender identity.
Democracy, the Rule of Law and Access to Justice: This analysis of…
Content type: Examples
An Accra High Court has ruled that the National Identification Authority can continue registering Ghanaians after two citizens filed a case arguing that continued registration violates the social distancing directive issued by president Akufo-Addo. However, a different division of the High Court granted a similar injunction filed by a group of 30 citizens, in force for ten days beginning on March 23.
Source: https://www.modernghana.com/news/992060/continue-with-your-ghana-card-registration-…
Content type: Examples
To help the UK's Department for Work and Pensions handle the more than half a million applications the department received in the last two weeks of March, the identity verification company Nomidio, a subsidiary of Post-Quantum, is offering its service free of charge. The service would enable a simple, server-based three-step verification process through a smartphone to help first-time users prove their identity.
Source: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202003/free-palm-and-face-biometrics-…
Content type: Examples
British biometric start-ups are helping the UK government create digital passports.
VST Enterprises is providing a biometrics-backed digital health care passport, V-COVID, to help critical NHS and emergency services workers get back to work; the passport will incorporate test results and be included in an app that can be scanned from two meters away. In combination, Patchwork Health, which provides NHS trusts with a digital platform and Truu, which provides a digital staff passport,…
Content type: Examples
Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte has exempted survey teams and National ID system registrars from lockdown rules on the basis that they are essential to providing cash distributions and other government responses intended to soften the impact of the community quarantine. Duterte argued that the acknowledged delays to the government's programme to assist low-income families derived from discrepancies in the lists of beneficiaries caused by relying on the 2015 census and that the implementation…
Content type: Advocacy
Privacy International welcomed the opportunity to contribute to the consultation on the Principles on Identification for Sustainable Development. Valuable lessons have been learnt, particularly in the last few years, on the serious consequences of identity systems. We have seen challenges in court that have found that key provisions of these systems are incompatible with the right to privacy enshrined in constitutions. We have seen civil society organisations highlighting the serious risks…
Content type: Case Study
In Peru, you get asked for your fingerprint and your ID constantly - when you’re getting a new phone line installed or depositing money in your bank account – and every Peruvian person has an ID card, and is included in the National Registry of Identity – a huge database designed to prove that everyone is who they say they are. After all, you can change your name, but not your fingerprint.
However, in 2019 the National Police of Peru uncovered a criminal operation that was doing just that:…
Content type: Case Study
Having a right to a nationality isn’t predicated on giving up your right to privacy - and allowing whichever government runs that country to have as much information as they want. It is about having a fundamental right to government protection.
For the first time since 1951, Assam - a state in the north east of India - has been updating its national register of citizens (NRC), a list of everyone in Assam that the government considers to be an Indian citizen. The final version, published in…
Content type: Long Read
Background
Kenya’s National Integrated Identity Management Scheme (NIIMS) is a biometric database of the Kenyan population, that will eventually be used to give every person in the country a unique “Huduma Namba” for accessing services. This system has the aim of being the “single point of truth”, a biometric population register of every citizen and resident in the country, that then links to multiple databases across government and, potentially, the private sector.
NIIMS was introduced…
Content type: News & Analysis
On 30 January 2020, Kenya’s High Court handed down its judgment on the validity of the implementation of the National Integrated Identity Management System (NIIMS), known as the Huduma Namba. Privacy International submitted an expert witness testimony in the case. We await the final text of the judgment, but the summaries presented by the judges in Court outline the key findings of the Court. Whilst there is much there that is disappointing, the Court found that the implementation of NIIMS…