Prompted by concerns over the ease with which foreigners will be able to travel in and out of the country once the Asean Economic Community (AEC) commences in 2015, the Institute for Forensic Medicine is calling on the government to collect the... Read more
More than 1.7 million DNA profiles of innocent adults and children have been deleted from the national database, ministers have revealed. As part of the Government’s commitment to slim down the amount of information held by the stat... Read more
When the state of New York expanded its DNA database last year, I didn’t give it much thought. After all, I am not a criminal, so it’s not like my DNA is going to be in the database anytime soon. And the use of DNA evidence has been, by a... Read more
As of November DNA samples taken in Swedish police investigations will also be available to Dutch police in a move which will eventually include all countries in the EU having access to a shared database. Read more
Concerns raised over proper privacy and civil rights safeguards Read more
When Oscar Thwala was sentenced to life imprisonment 10 years ago on three counts of rape, two counts of kidnapping, and illegal possession of ammunition and firearms, he’d never heard of DNA or of its use as a forensic tool in criminal investig... Read more
Actress Mia Farrow made gossip-news headlines this week when, asked by Vanity Fair whether her former husband Frank Sinatra was the father of her son Ronan, rather than Woody Allen as broadly understood, she replied, “possibly.” She said that no... Read more
The federal government is considering a move to collect DNA samples from suspects upon arrest for certain crimes, a significant expansion of current DNA databank laws that is raising concerns for criminal defence lawyers and civil-rights advocat... Read more
Rape cases are notoriously hard to prosecute in Pakistan. Under current law, victims must produce four witnesses — all male, adult, and pious — to bring rape allegations to trial. Forensic evidence, such as DNA samples, is considered... Read more
The government’s failure to set up new forensic labs and insufficient trained manpower is causing significant delay in criminal investigations. Today, the country has only 25 forensic labs with just 60 forensic experts at work, according to a pa... Read more