A writ petition has been filed with the High Court challenging legality of the police’s move to collect personal information about tenants from the landlords in Dhaka City by March 15.
Supreme Court lawyer Jyotirmoy Barua filed the petition yesterday, two days after he had sent a legal notice requesting the government to refrain from seeking the information. He also sought the court’s direction to stop use of any information already collected from the landlords and tenants.
The petitioner sought directives on the secretaries of ministries of law and home affairs, and the inspector general of police and the commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police to store the collected personal information in “safe custody,” so that no party can use it that until a specific law is enacted to protect the information.
According to the constitution, a citizen has every right to maintain secrecy of his/her personal life. The police cannot seek information from the ordinary people, Jyotirmoy told the Dhaka Tribune.
He filed the petition as the respondents had not replied to the legal notice sent to them on Tuesday.
In the legal notice, stating himself personally affected by the government instruction, the petitioner said that there is no specific law to ask for all this private information.
He also wanted to know under what legal basis the government was asking for the information and how the information would be stored.
The lawyer said that the information sought was very much personal and sensitive in nature, and could bring harm to the people.
“I personally think that you [police] are not professionally trained enough to handle digital information and there is every possibility that my information will be leaked to the wrong hands and abused,” he said.
The lawyer also said that there were instances that citizen’s personal information had been leaked and used by foreign companies in the past.
On the other hand, according to section 42 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, every citizen must help the police for government or investigation work. Under this section, police can seek information from anyone and citizens must cooperate. If necessary, the police can also take action under this section.
DMP sources said that the tenants’ information would be collected and maintained by the city’s respective police stations and shared through a central DMP database. The information would be stored categorised under respective neighbourhoods.
The initiative to create a tenant database was taken by the DMP Headquarters in the past, but the process did not success then due to several reasons. The move was taken afresh recently after the law enforcers raided two houses in Badda and Mohammadpur areas and found huge explosives in the flats used as militant dens.