ROSE HALL, St James — Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) boss, Terrence Williams, has called for a legislative framework to be put in place to protect the possible breach of privacy during covert surveillance.

“In the same way you have it for searches of houses and persons, for interception of phones, you need it for covert surveillance, like for drones, or if they bug your house; you need legislation to govern that because if the police are doing that they must be subject to some kind of control,” he argued.

The commissioner, who was speaking on the topic ‘The Eyes have it: Street Cameras, Drones and Police Bodycams – Towards Open Justice’ at a panel discussion during the Jamaican Bar Association’s Continuing Legal Education Weekend Conference at the Hilton Rose Hall Resort and Spa in St James on Saturday, stressed that the matter of covert surveillance “must be controlled by legislation and by judges who will decide whether to grant a warrant or not for the police to do that”.

He told members of the legal fraternity that there is a potential breach of privacy when the police and military undertake covert surveillance operations because there is no legal framework in place.

“There has been no attempt in Jamaica for a legal framework to be put in place to deal with this possible infringement of our privacy, and this is a failing of the State,” he stressed.

“The State must be able to regulate the possible infringement of rights of its citizens; it’s their duty to protect the inhabitants from arbitrary actions. The law in this area must be developed, and it must be accessible. It must not be that the police just develop an internal code for their surveillance [as] there must be a law that we can be seen. It doesn’t require us to know the covert techniques that they use; we don’t have to know them, but there needs to be some protection against covert surveillance of any means of which drones and CCTV are used.”

Williams suggested that such a legislation should state the nature of the offences or aims for which the surveillance is to be undertaken; what crimes or what suspicions will justify ordering surveillance; the subject of the surveillance; the length of time of the surveillance; how will the information be stored; who will have access to it; how will it be communicated to third parties, and how will it be destroyed.