The Legislative Assembly’s (AL) 1st Standing Committee, which is currently reviewing a government-initiated bill regulating the tapping of telephones during police investigations into criminal cases, will ask the government to explain some of the government-proposed additional types of crimes allowing telephone tapping by the police, lawmaker-cum-unionist Ella Lei Cheng I, who heads the committee, said yesterday.
Lei made the remarks when speaking to reporters after the committee’s closed-door meeting yesterday. No government officials attended yesterday’s meeting, which was the first one after the bill’s outline was passed during a plenary session last month.
According to the government, the bill, which is formally known as Legal System on Communications Interception and its Protection, aims to allow the police to tackle ever more sophisticated crimes due to the constant development of telecommunications technology while ensuring higher protection of citizens’ privacy rights.
Telephone tapping by the police is currently regulated by Articles 172 to 175 of the Penal Procedures Code, which came into force in 1997.
The bill proposes to cover additional types of suspected crimes that will allow the police to resort to tapping telephones that are currently not covered by the Penal Procedures Code, such as terrorism, money laundering, crimes endangering national security, organised crime, human trafficking, cybercrimes, crimes related to external trade activities, and bribery.
Lei said that the committee members are concerned whether all of the proposed additional kinds of crimes to be covered by police telephone tapping would be in line with the “proportionality principle” of offenders’ punishment.
The bill proposes that the police will only be allowed to intercept communications for certain crimes after obtaining formal approval from a judge who concludes that intercepting the communications is “necessary” for the police to be able to discover the truth, or when it is impossible or difficult for the police to collect the respective evidence any other way. This proposed principle is similar to the current telephone tapping rules listed in the Penal Procedures Code.
The bill also proposes various forms that the police can use for intercepting communications, such as surveillance, interception, audio recording, video recording and copying, as well as “other similar means that are necessary and consistent with the purpose of criminal investigations”. Lei said her committee will ask the government to explain in more detail what such “other similar means” would include.
Lei also said that some of the committee members suggested that the government set up a mechanism to regularly publish data to summarise cases where the interception of communications has been authorised without compromising judicial secrecy and without disclosing details of the respective cases. She added that her committee would soon pass to the government a list of questions raised by the members during yesterday’s meeting about the bill.
Lawmaker-cum-unionist Ella Lei Cheng I, who heads the legislature’s 1st standing committee, speaks to reporters after yesterday’s committee’s closed-door meeting reviewing the government-initiated telephone tapping bill. Photo: Ginnie Liang
