Senior UK appeal court judge advocates compulsory national DNA Database

According to the BBC a senior appeal court judge Lord Justice Stephen Sedley is advocating compulsory registration for all on Nu-Labs police DNA database. This would even include visitors to the country.

He conceded it was an authoritarian measure, but said he felt that the only way to go was to expand the database to cover the whole population and all visitors to the UK.

"Going forwards has very serious but manageable implications. It means that everybody, guilty or innocent, should expect their DNA to be on file for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention."

Good of him to acknowledge that it was authoritarian.

Frankly the question that now needs answering is that of his fitness to be a judge.

He went on to try to justify such a totalitarian move, because as things are: "It means where there is ethnic profiling going on disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities get onto the database.”

So his solution is that everyone should have to be on it.

How are disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities getting onto the database? Because they are being arrested in disproportionate numbers. What's more, if the whole population were forced to give samples, they would still be being arrested in disproportionate numbers - it would just be less visible. Very Nu-Lab.

This can surely not have been lost on the Judge and leads one to wonder why he felt it would be a good idea to disingenuously raise the issue of race to attempt to justify his authoritarianism.

He went on to complain "It also means that a great many people who are walking the streets and whose DNA would show them guilty of crimes, go free.".

The enlightened view would be “So what?” Some prices are too heavy to pay.

Good old Judge Sedley is clearly not a close follower of the English Jurist William Blackstone, who said; “Better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer”. Judge Sedley is apparently perfectly happy for the whole population to suffer the loss of one more liberty to ensure one or two less guilty persons escape.

The same arguments could probably have been used to attempt to attempt to justify compulsory fingerprinting of the entire population - but wasn’t was it?

Budding Stalins didn’t particularly complain about that. If system worked acceptably with finger prints, why can the same system with the same checks and balances not be used with DNA – including the removal from the system of innocent parties and those mistakenly, or wrongfully arrested.