Criminal Investigation (Identifying People) Amendment Bill 2013: WA's Burqa response and more

Friday 9 August 2013 @ 9.08 a.m. | Crime

The Criminal Investigation (Identifying People) Amendment Bill 2013 (Bill No 17 of 2013) was intorduced in the Western Australian Parliament's Legislative Assembly on 26 June 2013 and has now reached second reading stage (7 August 2013) in the Legislative Council. The main attention of media reports has been that the new law will require Muslim women to remove a burqa or niqab to prove their identity to Western Australian police. However, the Bill also covers several other matters of interest.

The Burqa Response

The legislation according to the government was drafted as "a specific response" to public outcry about the Carnita Matthews case in NSW, where Mathews "a burqa-wearing mother of seven" had a conviction of knowingly making a false statement quashed as a result of police being unable to confirm her identity.

The proposed Western Australian law will require a person to remove headwear or do other things to facilitate a police officer being able to confirm the person's identity and Officers will also get explicit powers to detain a person while they comply. The proposed law will not just apply to a burqa or niqab but also to an item of clothing, a hat, helmet, mask, sunglasses or any other thing worn by a person that totally or partially covers the person's head.

To achieve this the Bill contains amendments to section 16 of the Act that will enable police to request a person to remove headwear or do other things to facilitate the officer being able to confirm a person’s identity.

In his second reading speech the Minister for Polices said of the change:

"This amendment stems out of a New South Wales case where a women wearing a burqa was not able to be identified as being the person who made a false report to police. Upon hearing about this case, the government has taken action to ensure that similar injustices do not occur in Western Australia. These amendments provide a very explicit power to ensure that the intent of section 16 is met in all cases, including when the subject person refuses to remove an obstruction that is preventing the officer from being able to identify the person’s face. This provision is drafted in such a way as to apply the new powers to other acts when police source powers to request or require a person to provide personal details".

Other Measures

In general terms the Bill is said by the Western Australian Government to be a continuing response to the Statutory Review Reference Group’s report on the  statutory review of the Criminal Investigation (Identifying People) Act 2002. Among many other changes some of the key ones are:

The Bill makes provision for the further development of the science of biometrics by enabling regulations to be made to broaden the definition of what is considered an identifying particular under the Act. The government says this will enable new scientific developments to be swiftly brought under the legislative regime but also does not take away the Parliament’s ability to disallow such matters if they are not considered appropriate. The science of biometrics as used in criminal investigations relates to scientific methods of identification such as iris scanning, computerised voice recognition and the analysis of auto-antibodies in bodily fluids.

The Bill also looks at the difference between the types of identifying particulars that can be taken from charged and uncharged suspects and makes amendments to sections 34 and 47 of the Act to provide for more a consistent approach with respect to these two categories of suspect.

The Bill addresses the fact that the Act does not have a power to take identifying particulars from convicted persons, "given that there is a database index for this category of person and most other Australian jurisdictions have an equivalent power". The Bill proposes to address this by inserting a new part in the Act providing power for police to obtain identifying particulars from a person who is convicted of a serious offence incurring 12 months’ imprisonment or more such particulars needing to be obtained within six months after the relevant conviction.

The Bill is said to simplify the process of taking identifying particulars from charged suspects by removing the threshold requirement for a police officer to "reasonably suspect that any or all of a charged suspect’s identifying particulars are not or may not be held by Western Australian Police, or are or may be needed to verify the person’s identity with identification particulars already held by WA Police".

Sources: 

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