The Taiwan Jury Association on Wednesday called for the government to review the Executive Yuan’s anti-COVID-19 location tracking system and to establish a legal basis for the system to better uphold people’s rights.
Taichung District Court Judge Chang Yuan-sen (張淵森) on June 20 wrote an article for online media saying that police were using the system to track suspected criminals, which proved that the Central Epidemic Command Center’s promise that the information would not be used outside of disaese prevention to be false.
Taiwan Jury Association president Chen Wei-hsiang (陳為祥) in an online news conference on Wednesday said that the act of tracking citizens is in itself undemocratic and only tolerated as a special measure during the COVID-19 pandemic, but without a proper legal basis it poses a severe threat to democracy.
Taiwan People’s Party Legislator Chang Chyi-lu (張其祿) said that the legislature had cut NT$500 million (US$17.86 million) from a proposed National Communications Commission budget specifically due to human rights concerns regarding the location tracking system.
Chang said that he would draw up a proposal to demand that the Ministry of Health and Welfare issue a report on how the data is being used.
The center has been given extraordinary and unmitigated powers under Article 7 of the Special Act for Prevention, Relief and Revitalization Measures for Severe Pneumonia with Novel Pathogens (嚴重特殊傳染性肺炎防治及紓困振興特別條例) and it should collaborate with the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior to issue a clear ban on the use of location tracking data in criminal investigations, he said.
District courts should also be on their guard when issuing approvals to track suspected criminals, he added.
Lawyer Lu Cheng-yen (呂政諺) said the center’s statement that the system would not be used in this way had no legal backing and only amendments to the Personal Data Protection Act (個人資料保護法) and the Communication Security and Surveillance Act (通訊保障及監察法) would be able to “fix” the situation.
Judges and prosecutors would have to carefully deliberate whether requests to use such information should be approved prior to the amendments passing, Lu said.
Aletheia University Department of Law associate professor Wu Ching-chin (吳景欽) said that it is imperative that the Communication Security and Surveillance Act strictly prohibit personal data obtained from disease prevention location tracking systems being used for other purposes.
If the tracking system loses credibility among the public, it could lead to breaches in pandemic prevention, as the public would no longer trust or use the system, Taiwan Forever Association researcher Peng Chih-cheng (彭至誠) said.
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