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Sources: BBC, The Telegraph

Civil liberties campaigners have accused the UK government of a U-turn on its pledge to delete the DNA profiles of innocent people.

At the moment, the DNA of anyone who has been arrested in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is held indefinitely on a national database. Under the Protection of Freedoms Bill, currently before Parliament, samples from innocent people will be deleted from the national DNA database (see previous news), but local forensic science laboratories could retain anonymised samples.The Home Office argues that to destroy samples from local laboratories would be difficult because DNA samples of innocent people are stored in ‘batches’ with the DNA of guilty people. Daniel Hamilton, director of the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, said the anonymised samples would retain their bar code, allowing them to be ‘married up’ with information about individuals.

Although DNA is unique to a specific person (with the exception of identical twins), some campaigners fear that human error could result in contamination of samples, errors in data handling and misinterpretation of profiles, leading to potential miscarriages of justice. However, these concerns would be equally valid for the examination of DNA samples from previously convicted criminals.