Kuwait to enact mandatory DNA collection from every citizen to build national genetic database

DNA Sequence

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

[Visistors] to Kuwait [in 2016] may be in for a shock when they find they’ll have to give the government…their DNA. A 2015 law requiring all citizens, residents and visitors to provide DNA to the government’s database will go into effect later this summer [of 2016], according to Kuwaiti officials, making the small Gulf nation the first country in the world to legislate mandatory DNA collection.

Such indiscriminate collection violates the international standards for privacy established by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Kuwait ratified.

[G]enetic experts, researchers and civil rights advocates fear that the government might expand the uses of the database…to reveal sensitive information about health or paternity[.]

“Totalitarian regimes have often tried to build databases on all citizens to develop targets that they’d like to discriminate against,” [said Helen Wallace, the director of GeneWatch].

Wafa Ben Hassine, a legal analyst[,] said the information revealed by DNA could further be “used to discriminate against people who are non-citizens.”

Read full, original post: One Country’s Disturbing Project to Build a Complete DNA Databank of Every Citizen and Foreign Visitor Is Already Underway

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