Italy: Carabinieri hold an illegal DNA database
01 March 2006
A lawyer from Bolzano has filed a complaint to the Italian data protection ombudsman's office alleging that the caribinieri's Reparto Investigazioni Scientifiche (RIS, scientific investigative unit) in Parma holds an illegal DNA database. A DNA sample, taken in connection with an investigation into a robbery, tested positive for an Albanian man whose sample had been taken during a rape investigation in 1999. In court, the man's lawyer, Francesco Coran, appealed on the grounds that there is no legal basis for the maintenance of a database, and said that he would present his case to the Ombudsman.
During the trial, a carabinieri major from the Parma RIS explained that "as a general practice, we receive everything ...and then, we have software that we have developed in-house, where we store this data...which relate to possible suspects in different cases". The DNA identification of the three possible suspects derived from samples obtained from cigarette butts collected at the crime scene. "These three profiles...were inserted into the software which does not do anything other than compare their [reference] numbers and check whether there are matching pairs of numbers". The Albanian man's DNA matched samples collected in relation to two previous investigations. One of these was an investigation of a rape in which none of the 400 samples collected from suspects matched the culprit's genetic profile. The man's lawyer noted that "the RIS did not destroy the results of the tests as it should have in accordance with what the law on privacy establishes" but rather, entered them into the software "to use them again whenever it needed to identify a suspect's DNA".
The report, published in L'Unità newspaper on 16 May 2006, cites carabinieri sources revealing that "apart from the software that manages the genetic profiles of at least 15,000 people, on the second floor of the RIS office in Parma, there are at least five or six fridges where the test tubes with watery solutions of biological matter are preserved...Inside these freezers, there is genetic matter that has yet to be tested, but also some that concerns cases that have already been shelved".
This is precisely one of the main concerns of the president of the data protection ombudsman's authority, Francesco Pizzetti, who stresses that if it is a case of biological DNA samples being stored "it would be a lot more serious", giving rise to important concerns due to the amount of information that can be discovered about someone, than if it only concerned alphanumeric identification codes. Pizzetti also says that "if it is confirmed, that the RIS carabinieri is doing the collection, and especially the storage, of biological samples, it is illegal". He claims that the EU is pressing for regulations to be introduced in this field, referring to the Prüm Treaty, to which Italy is not a party, and to the possibility that the SIS II database may include DNA identification functions.
L'Unità, 16.5.06.