Census Faces Right To Privacy Challenge In High Court

Two men who say that the 2011 census was unlawful because of a provision in the act that governs it which allows data to be passed to third parties, will bring their case in front of a high court judge on Thursday.

In a judicial review, lawyers representing a British Muslim and an Afghan refugee will argue that the Office for National Statistics' decision to grant a data processing contract to a UK subsidiary of the US defence contractor Lockheed Martin breaches the two men's right to privacy as guaranteed by the European convention on human rights.

The hearing before Mr Justice Beatson at the high court in Birmingham comes as more than 250 people have been prosecuted for failing to fill in the census.

The 2007 Statistics and Registration Service Act protects the privacy of information gathered for the census.

However an exemption was added that allows information to be handed over if the requesting state requires it for a criminal investigation.

In addition to this, under the US's Patriot Act, the American government can compel any US company to hand over information it holds for the purposes of a criminal investigation.

Lawyers for the two men will argue that Lockheed Martin's UK subsidiary would also be subject to that demand.

"It may be inadvertent, but there is a double loyalty," said Ramby de Mello, the lawyer representing the two men at the hearing. "We believe that the subsidiary and its parent company, which are not public bodies, are outside the reach of the Human Rights Act and the Data Protection Act."

"I think that the reason the exemption about disclosure was inserted into the act was to open out the tendering process to US companies who otherwise would not have been competitive," said de Mello. "If we are correct, then it would affect every other tendering process."

A spokesman for the ONS, the executive office of the UK Statistics Authority, said it would comment after the hearing.

(H)