JAMAICA’S Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Paula Llewellyn, QC, weighing in on a recent media report that the Electoral Office of Jamaica (EOJ) is engaged in selling voters’ data, insinuating that the entity was in breach of the Data Protection Act, says if the matter was put to her office for a ruling it would have to rule “that there is no case”.

Speaking at the Electoral Commission of Jamaica’s (ECJ) Long Service Awards Ceremony at the Terra Nova All-Suite Hotel in St Andrew on Wednesday, the DPP, in referring to the March 27 report, chastised “elements of the media” who she said are “prepared to sacrifice accuracy on the altar of expediency”, bringing entities into “disrepute”.

“It is unfortunate that sometimes like the DPP and other public persons, it is a rite of passage that you have to endure the slings and arrows in public life and for what I would call an overexuberant, and I’m being kind, media. Media is very important but unfortunately you will have elements who suffer from perpetual youthful exuberance and who sometimes come up with stories that…put your entity into disrepute,” she said.

According to Llewellyn, having examined the issue with others from her office, it was agreed that “if somebody who wanted to test the matter took [the EOJ] to court, the big issue would be where is the evidence of the misuse, mishandling or exploitation when it was quite clear that the citizen used the card to engage in business, thereby sharing the information and it was just a situation where the institution which issued the card was being asked to verify”.

“The court in our view would assess the situation against the background that the particular data was shared with the intent of the information being shared with a view to engaging in business and there the financial institution would have to be able to verify that this card was indeed issued by the EOJ. So where then is the breach? Because you are not sharing any information that was not shared by the citizen with the financial institution. You are seeking only to verify and authenticate. Therefore, if that was put to us for a ruling, we would have to rule that there is no case,” the DPP said.

In driving home her point the DPP said an elector using his card to do business, for example, with a bank, implicitly shares his private information on the card with the particular institution.

“Remember, we are in an era of identity theft, it would be an irresponsible institution who does not find a way to authenticate and to verify that it in fact a genuine article issued by the [EOJ]. Look at the exposure that you would have in terms of a business like a bank if they accepted a card purporting to identify a member of the public that they have not been able to verify,” Llewellyn said.

According to the DPP, this would send a signal to the criminal community that the financial entity had loose controls and was an easy target for scamming, forgery and fraud. Furthermore, she said a lot of members of the public who may not be able to afford to apply for and get passports would be short served in terms of being able to do business.

She said the follow-up article, which was published in response to the EOJs statement, which stated that the EOJ had denied selling voter information was also “unfortunate”.

“There are elements of the media who think that the only way to sell their newspaper or to get more viewers or to get more popular is to have bad news,” she said, noting that the EOJ and ECJ are excellent, high-calibre entities being admired and modelled in other countries.

“I am all for press freedom, [but] this is sometimes the dilemma we in public life have to face, that you are out there on the stage — and I’m speaking metaphorically — where someone can walk up and slap you… And you just have to have the grace and the class to take it and continue to do your job and make sure you do not go down into the gutters,” the DPP said.

The EOJ, in a quick response to the article on March 28, maintained that it had neither sold nor granted access to its database which contains electors’ biometric and demographic information. It went further to say the database utilised by entities assists with authentication of voter ID cards which are required by entities when electors conduct business with them.