SECURITY AT WHAT COST?: NEW LAW ALLOWS WIDESPREAD FREEDOMS ON PERSONAL SURVEILLANCE
- Last week the National Assembly passed a law on civilian surveillance that, in general terms, aims to guard against terrorism and the security of the state. Meanwhile right activists say the law is liable to abuse that violates human rights, and that it legalizes the Soviet espionage system of supervising private thoughts and opinions. The law ascribes the right of surveillance to the police, national security, tax and customs services, as well as to institutions of justice. The right for phone tapping and extracting information from the technical routes of communication is ascribed only to the service acting within the system of the national security based on mediation from other bodies.
One controversial element of the law is that it allows informers to operate without contract and without taxing of salaries, presumably to protect their identity. In other words, the bodies implementing the law enjoy a level of privacy citizens may be losing.
Armenia’s first Ombudsman and Heritage party MP Larisa Alaverdyan said the law revives Stalinist means of public control.
The law prohibits only Members of Parliament, cabinet ministers and judges from being informants.
Alaverdyan says all others can be turned into informers. She draws attention to the article titled “Indoor Surveillance”: “The indoor surveillance is the shadowing of a person (persons) and the supervision of certain cases and events with or without the use of special and other technical means in apartment, as well as the fixing of the results of shadowing on video, audio, photo, electronic and other carriers or without their use.”
Alaverdyan underlines the phrasing of “without their use”, which means fake cases can be proceeded against a person without any record made on a carrier, without material proof, based on the information given by an unknown informer: “The law gives opportunity to create a social stratum of virtual informers not registered anywhere, paying no taxes, a phantom without a contract, someone that is not fixed in any way, that may be non-existent. And, an opportunity is created to forge a voluminous case against anyone in the name of that unknown or non-existent person.”
Alaverdyan says this is a system that is outside the field of public supervision and contradicts Armenia’s international agreements. “If someone is suspected, all of his family members get under supervision. The right for private life inviolability is infringed; the state deals with the most secret sides of person’s private life, without the right for it.”
The law prohibits providing obviously false information, but the mechanism of deciding whether the information is false or not is missing. Therefore, any informer can give false information against his personal enemies, as was the case in the Stalin times.
The Heritage faction made an attempt to kill the vote, but failed, and the draft law was passed in the second reading.
Naira Zohrabyan of the Prosperous Armenia Party has said the persecutions are done all the same and it’s good to have a law; Vahan Hovhannisyan from the Armenian Revolutionary Federation has said it’s better to have a bad law, than no law at all; and the Republicans have substantiated the passage with the existence of such laws in Iran, Iraq and the US.
Alaverdyan says draft laws under the cover of the fight against terrorism and defense of the state security enter the parliament one after another, which strengthen the supervision set by the authorities in various aspects, and the people’s political views in particular.
Alaverdyan ties the decision by the Commission for Regulation of Public Services on providing pre-paid mobile phone numbers based on a written contract adopted on March 30th with this phenomenon. (See:Big Brother or State Need?)
All the subscribers to the pre-paid cards were supposed to sign contracts with their operators by November 1st. However, the commission has prolonged the deadline to March 1st 2008, taken into notice only 25 and 17 percent of subscribers of respectively Armentel and VivaCell have so far managed to sign the contracts.
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