LONDON — Britain bowed to a court ruling and promised Thursday to remove the DNA records of hundreds of thousands of innocent people from its vast national database of genetic information — but many will have to wait up to 12 years for their details to be deleted.
People arrested on suspicion of a vast range of minor offenses, such as shoplifting or public drunkenness, will have their DNA profiles held for six years even if they are not charged.
Critics accused the government of flouting the spirit of a European Court of Human Rights ruling and undermining the legal presumption of innocence in British law. The court in December rejected Britain’s “blanket and indiscriminate” storage of genetic information.
“People in Britain should be innocent until proven guilty,” said Chris Grayling, law and order spokesman for the opposition Conservatives. “Ministers are just trying to get away with as little as they possibly can instead of taking real action to remove innocent people from the DNA database.”
British police can take DNA samples from anyone who is arrested and can keep the genetic profiles indefinitely even if the suspect is never charged. Some victims of crime have found themselves on the database after samples of their blood or other genetic material were taken from crime scenes.
The British DNA database holds genetic profiles of more than 5 million people — 8 percent of the country’s population.
The FBI’s national U.S. database, although larger, has information on about 0.5 percent of Americans.
