Date published: 2008/09/28
The BBC says:
David Reid reports on a storm brewing in France over plans to build a database to hold details of people considered likely to breach public order.
Civil liberties groups fear that the new police database, called Edvige, would significantly erode rights to privacy.
Although governments regularly gather and store data about citizens, Edvige would include information about the youngest members of society.
"These people could be filed starting from the age of thirteen with a very large amount of data on their life, on their relatives, on their friends, acquaintance ... everything," says Meryem Marzouki from the French National Scientific Research Center (CNRS).
Justifying the creation of Edvige, Gerard Gachet, a spokesperson for the French Ministry of the Interior, says: "Unfortunately we have been confronted by an explosion in juvenile crime."
"If you want to put into force a preventative measure, you have to be able to list these young people in a dossier, and be able to go and see them. Or go and see their parents and say 'watch out', your son or daughter is at risk of falling into juvenile crime," he says.
The row over Edvige led thousands of French people to sign an online petition which forced the French president Nicolas Sarkozy to revise plans.
Among the changes were the withdrawal of the proposal to include political activists, union leaders and religious leaders in the same dossier as potential delinquent youngsters.
Jean-Claude Vitran, from the human rights group Ligue des droits de l'Homme, fears what the data in Edvige will be used for.
"We could well imagine that the one day the extreme left could take power in a democratic country like ours. Then what happens to this information? What do we do? What we'll have is what happened in Eastern Europe 40 or 30 years ago. We'll have police files like the Stasi's," says Mr Vitran. "We don't want that."
Civil rights groups are continuing their fight against Edvige claiming that it will turn France into a Big Brother State. A ruling on the database is expected by the end of the year.
Just the latest attempt by a Western country to try and enact wholesale removal of civil liberties. One can quite easily imagine that anyone on this database could be refused certain types of employment, etc. (And it would be interesting to see what percentage of young people are involved in some kind of crime. Probably near enough 100%. But of course it's the non-middle-class and non-white young people that this database would be aimed at.)
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