Martin Partington: Spotlight on the Justice System

This Act of Parliament deals with a somewhat miscellaneous series of matters, but ones which had caused political controversy, where it was argued (and the Coalition Government had accepted) that the balance between the rights of the individual and the interests of the State was not right. (It had indeed been preceded by the Identity Documents Act 2010, which abolished measures relating to the introduction of identity cards, introduced by the previous Labour administration.) Among the measures included in the 2012 Act are:
• reducing the maximum period of pre-charge detention (without trial) for terrorist suspects to 14 days;
• deleting the DNA samples and fingerprints of more than 1m innocent people from police databases;
• deleting the DNA samples and fingerprints of more than 1m innocent people from police databases;
• abolishing a law to permit trials without juries in serious fraud cases;
• ending the fingerprinting of children in schools without parental consent; and
• introduction of a code of practice for CCTV and Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems
For more detail of these and other provisions go to http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/media-centre/news/protection-of-freedoms and follow the links.