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21 - Rarely pure and never simple

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Stephen Sedley
Affiliation:
Judiciary of England and Wales
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Summary

This paper was given as the Leicester University Law School Lecture in November 2004. The cautious passage towards the end about the uses of DNA was published by the London Review of Books. There it rested until, three years later, a BBC journalist looking to put together a piece for the Today programme about DNA records got me to say on tape what I'd said in the lecture. The resultant brouhaha – the BBC leading its news bulletin with ‘A senior judge has called for a national DNA register’, the press picking it up and running everywhere with it – did not do much for such liberal credentials as I had.

It remains the case that DNA is a potent instrument both for detecting the guilty and – just as important – for eliminating the innocent, though I am less sanguine now than I was in 2004 about the feasibility of restricting a register of such information to safe hands. But a universal register has in any event been placed beyond reach by the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in the Marper case, which at the time of the lecture had just been decided by the House of Lords. Instead of recognising that the DNA regime in England and Wales was arbitrary and discriminatory in the ways described in this essay and proposing principled reforms, the UK government sought to defend it in Strasbourg, and in consequence came away with a decision that no ‘blanket’ system (which ours, ironically, was not – on the contrary – it was partial in both senses) was compatible with Article 8 of the Convention. […]

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Chapter
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Ashes and Sparks
Essays On Law and Justice
, pp. 213 - 224
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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