By Gabriel Princewill-
The Information Commission office(ICO) has called for media publications to think outside the box when organisations contacted evade investigative queries from the press about individual cases.
The ICO’s comments come in the wake of an investigation by The UK Guardian newspaper into why a Jamaican born in the Uk was deported to Jamaica after doing his time for murder.
The situation was flagged up for examination a month ago, but not immediately pursued by this publication after we initially took the view that the presence of a murderer in the Uk was not necessarily conducive to the British public, irrespective of whether he had served his sentence.
However, the question of discrimination on the grounds that he would have been treated differently had he been a white male, raised the issue of whether this could be a clear case of institutional racism by The Home Office.
The convicted murderer in this case, Richard Wallace, was born in Paddington in London in 1969 and was convicted of murdering a man working at a takeaway in south London.
After serving his sentence. Mr Wallace was incorrectly classed as Jamaican, in what Wallace believes was a case of mistaken identity, and deported to the Caribbean island in 2015.
Strangely, he was wrongly accused of using his own passport fraudulently and was jailed for two years, before being released in October 2020 after DNA tests with other British members of his family proved him to be a match with them.
He accused the Home Office of institutional racism an ironically rich claim from a convicted murder, but one nevertheless worthy of scrutiny.
Thinking Outside The Box
The Home Office declined to respond to the Guardian’s inquiry citing ”individual cases”, but the Information Commission Office which regulates issues of Data Protection told The Eye Of Media.Com that organisations have no grounds to refuse accountability on the flawed grounds of Data protection if the individual concerned consents to the investigation.
”Media organisations should think outside the box and realise they can get the consent of the individual concerned when investigating a matter relating to their individual data.
All organisations in the Uk are duty bound to respond to press inquiries in the public interest, and cannot use inapplicable Data Protection Laws to evade accountability. Data Protection Concerns Privacy, but if an individual is prepared to go public on their situation, then privacy does not arise where their consent is obtained’.’
Asked whether honourable organisations ought not to request the needed express consent of the individual concerned, the representative said: ” the primary duty should be on the press to seek the necessary consent, and present it to the organisation or institution being investigated”.
In reality, there is no reason it should not work both ways.
Potential Evasiveness
Organisations in the Uk routinely avoid responding to queries from the press about individual cases, allowing them to avoid the requisite level of scrutiny on important matters of public interest, while they conveniently hide behind generic statements that effectively hamper the investigation.
The Guardian said in its report of last month that it had seen Internal Home Office files which read: ”it is very likely that the status of the document which has been recorded as a ‘fraudulently obtained document’ is also incorrect as we know that the passenger using the passport was Richard David Wallace.”
The Guardian’s editor, Cathy Black, as well as freelancer, Diane Taylor, who wrote the article, have both been notified about the position of the Information Commissioner’s Office(ICO) on investigations pertaining to individual cases.
The Guardian is renowned for holding powerful organisations to account, and to a large extent did so in this case by reporting on the story and exposing a so far inexplicable series of events relating to the case of Mr. Wallace.
However, with the expressed co-operation of Mr. Wallace, the matter could have been delved into much deeper, forcing a greater level of accountability by obtaining a clear explanation about its actions, or potentially exposing the government department of having no good reason.