Government to fingerprint nation

Minister of the Interior Chang Po-ya (張博雅) yesterday said that blanket replacement of ID cards for all Taiwan nationals would take place next July, and that all cardholders over the age of 14 would be fingerprinted for a national database.

The announcement came after years of government wrangling over the issue and protests by rights activists that the fingerprint database plan would violate human rights.

Peter Huang (黃文雄), former chairperson of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights (台灣人權促進會), said opponents of the plan would launch a campaign to persuade people not to collect the new cards if the database plan goes ahead.

But Huang, though concerned over the issue, said he did not believe the government's plan was set in stone.

"The Ministry of the Interior has simply been currying support for the idea," he said.

The 1997 amendment to Article 8 of the Household Registration Law (戶籍法) prescribed that people over the age of 14 must have their fingerprints recorded upon being issued their ID cards.

The rationale behind the amendment was that fingerprint technology could help prevent card forgery and would help greatly during criminal investigations.

But the government has thus far failed to implement the law, because of budgetary constraints and disagreement between government departments.

The President's Advisory Group on Human Rights (人權諮詢小組), set up after the DPP came to power, opposed the idea on the grounds that it represented a violation of human rights, but the Ministry of the Interior and the National Police Administration were for the fingerprint database plan.

Amid the impasse over the policy, the watchdog Control Yuan in May censured the Ministry of the Interior for not meeting the requirements of the law. It was also reported that the president's advisory group had softened its hard-line stance on the issue.

But Huang was adamant that the policy conflicts with President Chen's advocacy of human rights.

"People's privacy must be protected," he said. "The government's current practice of assigning an [ID card] number to every citizen is already questionable.

"[The fingerprint database] would make society more transparent to the government, but the government does not appear transparent enough to the people."

"This would have a serious impact on the power and rights balance between the government and the people."

The Ministry of the Interior said that due to financial problems, the collection of fingerprints would have to be conducted through traditional inkpad fingerprinting, rather than the originally proposed method of using special computer scanners. The ministry, however, refused to say whether the inkpad method was a final decision.

An unnamed official at the interior ministry's Department of Population said they worried that the use of ink might cause more inconvenience to people and could therefore bring even more complaints.

He said the quality of fingerprints recorded using ink might also be inferior to that of digital scanning. But he denied that either method of fingerprint collection constitutes a fundamental breach of human rights.