The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project, SERAP has called on President Muhammadu Buhari to review and rescind his reported approval for security agencies to access people’s personal details through the National Identification Number, NIN-Subscriber Identity Module, SIM linkage without due process of law.
SERAP also advised Buhari to send executive bills to the National Assembly to reform all laws, which are unreliable and incompatible with Nigerians’ rights to privacy, dignity and freedom.
The organisation noted that the interference entailed by unlawfully or arbitrarily accessing people’s personal details, is far-reaching and must be considered to be particularly serious. Interference with an individual’s right to privacy is not permissible if it is unlawful or arbitrary.
It would be recalled that last week that one year after the NIN-SIM policy came into force, the spate of the security challenges and fraud had festered, to which the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami, had decried that no operative sought permission to access the NIN-SIM database or any other information in an effort to rescue a kidnapped victim, despite a blanket approval subsisting for security operatives. He had told reporters in Saudi Arabia, on the sidelines of the LEAP 2022 technology and exhibition conference, that some of the security institutions, based on Cybercrime law, are allowed to have access to the database without coming to the ministry or telecoms operators because that database allows for Lawful Intercept.
