If the National Identification System should come on stream as scheduled, the law governing its application will have to be passed in short order.

Members of the project team said in a recent interview that although preparatory work continues, the National Identification and Registration Act (NIRA) needs to proceed through Parliament quickly to accommodate the September 2018 deadline for enrolment — roughly one year away.

“Ideally, based on our project plan… for us to meet that deadline we would have to get the laws enacted between September and early October of this year. Otherwise, we would have to go back and adjust our timetable,” Programme Director Warren Vernon told the J amaica Observer.

“While we are planning, we are also conscious that we have to wait on the policymakers and the different stakeholders and civil society to make their contribution, which they have been doing,” he said. “We have no control over that. What we can do is hope that it will go through the processes as quickly as possible because if not, we are not going to meet that September 2018 deadline.”

According to Jacqueline Lynch-Stewart, chief technical director at the Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation Division in the Office of the Prime Minister, the first phase of enrolment will only include “public sector employees and one other community that is representative of everyone in the island”.

“The first phase is the pilot because obviously it’s new to Jamaica, so we’re going to do a pilot… to make sure we work through all the kinks,” Lynch Stewart told a forum hosted by Jamaicans For Justice last Thursday at The University of the West Indies, Mona in Kingston.

“Once we get through tweaking anything we need then we go to the national roll-out. This is all subject to the Bill being passed,” she added, noting that the national roll-out is scheduled for April 2019.

The Government in June replaced the NIRA Bill, originally tabled by Prime Minister Andrew Holness in March, after the previous Bill was withdrawn because of several changes made as suggested by multiple stakeholders.

The prime minister, in his 2016 budget presentation, vowed his Administration’s commitment to the implementation of the National Identification System (NIDS). The project is spearheaded by the Office of the Prime Minister and commenced in 2011.

But the implementation of NIDS is dependent on the passage of other Bills.

“…There are a couple of policies and laws that will have to accompany the National Identification and Registration Authority [Bill] — one being the Data Protection and Privacy laws and regulations,” Vernon stated.

“We are [also] planning to put in place laws for public sector data sharing to ensure that, by law, we are authorised to share data in government and with the private sector, using the conditions that before we share, it is in fact authorised by the data owner,” he continued.

Advocacy manager at JFJ Rodje Malcolm also expressed the group’s concern that NIRA, “in at least three specific ways” ,relies on other legislation that are not yet enforced.

“As you read the Bill you realise there is an overall mandate to be secure, to be private, and to ensure the highest data protection standards… but none of those security standards are in the law. The Government anticipates that all of these will be applied by the Data Protection Act, which is to be tabled in short order; and the Data Sharing Act, which will also deal with how data that is protected is also shared. [But] the ability of the authority to transmit, modify and to store pertinent biometric and demographic information is of serious concern and, therefore, this law, in JFJ’s opinion, cannot be enforced prior to those standards in other legislations being enforced,” he argued.

In June, Minister of Science, Energy and Technology Dr Andrew Wheatley told the Sunday Observer that the Data Protection Bill would have been brought to Parliament that month, but this did not happen.

Last month Dr Wheatley said the Bill will be tabled this month (September) when Parliament reconvenes following the summer recess.

The Data Protection Bill is aimed at safeguarding the privacy of individuals whose personal information has been documented by entities with which they interface.

Vernon, in referring to the team’s recent trip to South Korea, noted that they have made a conscious decision to not make the same mistakes as the South Koreans, who have had their own identification system since the early 1960s.

“In South Korea and other parts of the world… they started their identification system without the legislation. But we decided that we are not going to begin until we are authorised to do so by law and know that the citizens of the country know what is documented in the law, what is approved, so they know exactly what they are getting into. That is a key component for us. If we get that done, we will be on our way to getting the solution implemented,” he said.