A lawyer has sent a legal notice requesting the government to refrain from demanding personal information about tenants from the landlord in Dhaka.
Supreme Court lawyer Jyotirmoy Barua sent the notice to the secretaries of law and home ministries, IGP and DMP commissioner on Tueday.
In the notice, the lawyer asked the recipients to inform him within 24 hours the legal basis of the action of providing personal information to landlord. Otherwise, he mentioned that he would seek legal protection in court.
Stating that he is personally affected by the government instruction, Jyotirmoy Barua said there is no specific law to ask for all this private information unless there is a valid order from a competent court.
He also wanted to know under what basis the government is asking his private information and also how the information will be stored and under which law.
DMP sources said local tenant 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.
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A pilot database is now running at the DMP HQ and would later be introduced to police stations as well, the sources said.
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 efforts were revived recently after the Counter-terrorism and Transnational Crime Unit of police raided two houses in Badda and Mohammadpur to recover explosives and arrested Ansarullah Bangla Team members earlier this month.
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.
