Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) is to continue with its initiative of collecting information tenants in the capital city as the High Court yesterday rejected a writ petition that challenged the legality of the move.
The HC bench of Justice Moyeenul Islam Chowdhury and Justice Md Iqbal Kabir passed the rejection order, saying the DMP can take any step under the DMP Rules 2006 to prevent any terrorist activity in the city.
Police may interfere in the privacy of any citizen in the greater interest of upholding law and order, the court observed.
The High Court, however, said if any unlawful incident happens using the collected information, the victims – tenants and landlords – may take legal actions according to the law.
Later, talking to the reporters petitioner Jyotirmoy Barua, who represented himself in court, said the High Court had not given any guideline on how to preserve and process the collected information.
The court thinks that the information can be collected according to the specific rules of 2006 but the rule has no guideline about preserving the information.
“I will move to the appeal court with the petition,” he said.
The court heard the petition on two days.
Jyotirmoy filed the petition on March 3, two days after he had sent a legal notice requesting the government to refrain from seeking information of tenants.
He said there was no legal basis of collecting such information about tenants from their landlords and terming it a violation of people's rights to privacy.
According to the constitution, a citizen has every right to maintain secrecy of his/her personal life.
The DMP on February 29 announced that it had been collecting identification information about landlords and tenants since November last year and asked all to provide the information by March 15.
In the form, they have been asked to provide passport size photographs, identification number of national ID, passport, phone number, date of birth, reason of leaving the previous rented house, details on all family members, house helps and drivers.
Police say 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, police can also take action under this section.
DMP sources said that the tenants' information would be collected and maintained by the police stations concerned and shared through a central DMP database. The information would be stored under respective neighbourhoods.
The DMP had once taken a similar initiative in the past but the process did not succeed.
A fresh move was taken recently after law enforcers had raided two houses in Badda and Mohammadpur areas and found huge cache of explosives in flats used as militant dens.
Meanwhile, Monirul Islam, DMP's additional commissioner and head of a Counter-terrorism and Transnational Crime Unit, has urged Dhaka city landlords to submit personal information of their tenants to the police voluntarily.
“We have legal right to collect the information of tenants but we want the residents to do it voluntarily,” he said.
Talking about the security of the information, Monirul said: “We are giving 100% assurance that the information will only be used by the law enforcers and will not be leaked to anyone else.”
