Quito, Ecuador – The National Service of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, in charge of taking genetic samples from prisoners in Ecuador, confirmed to France 24 that oral swabs in prisons were interrupted after March 15, 2024 to look for “points for improvement.” ” of a pilot plan, while the institution that governs the prisons assured that there was no such suspension. The pause in the first phase of the process to create a genetic database occurred after the complaint by the Spanish newspaper El País, which claimed that the prisoners were “tricked” into accepting the sample, and the angry protest of relatives. due to lack of consent for the procedure.
“Enough of genetic testing without consent,” says the sign held up by Carmen*, mother of a person deprived of liberty who is serving a preventive detention order in the prison of Cotopaxi, an Andean province of Ecuador, on March 25, 2024.
That day, she and more than 30 families protested in front of the offices of the National Comprehensive Care Service for Persons Deprived of Liberty and Adolescent Offenders (SNAI) for the mistreatment of prisoners in the still militarized prisons, the absence of information official of their relatives and an alleged lack of informed consent by inmates to accept DNA samplingthrough an oral swab, which will be part of a state genetic database.
Worried, Carmen*, a migrant mother, told France 24 that her relative had been told “that he had to give his genetic sample because it is a requirement for him to be repatriated, and that is what we want, but no one gives me an answer about that.” process or when we can take him to Venezuela because he doesn't even have a sentence. We also knew that other (prisoners) would be forced.”
Other mothers, on the other hand, did not know if their children authorized the sample to be taken.
Days later, from his cell in the Cotopaxi prison, a prisoner whose name is withheld by this media reported that, before taking the swab, they told him: “This is to have better information about you in the system, in a base, and they made me sign a sheet. Since they were updating data and my fingerprints before, I just signed. But I didn't know I could say no.” The sample they obtained from her It is one of the 3,974 collected from February 21 to March 15, which are now in the custody of the Government. Since that day, no more have been taken.
On March 16, the Spanish newspaper 'El País' assured that the Government of Daniel Noboa was creating a database of genetic profiles “secretly” and “by deceit” according to police sources, who would have said that the instruction was not to tell the prisoners that they had the right to refuse.
Two days before, on March 14, the SOS Prisons citizen platform announced similar information in which it warned that the informed consent.
However, the official version is different. General Milton Zárate, director of the National Service of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, the institution in charge of taking and custody of genetic samples, He rejected, during an interview with this media, that the process was carried out without consent.
“To take the samples, the staff and experts have been trained and instructed to give all the instructions to the people deprived of their liberty before beginning the process,” he told France 24.
Zárate also assured that the staff “is clear that it is not an obligation for them and if someone doesn't want to, nothing happens. There is no one who is forcing them.”
According to the Government, the collection of genetic samples, which began on February 21 in five Ecuadorian prisons, is part of the creation of a database of genetic profiles specifically for forensic and humanitarian research purposes.
“This base will allow us to have solid means of evidence to resolve complicated criminal cases in crimes such as femicides, homicides, sexual violence, among others, in addition to possible deaths due to natural disasters,” says Zárate.
And, in fact, it is regulated: the regulation that establishes the parameters for the construction and administration of that base was issued on December 20, 2022. Its instructions, however, were published on July 18, 2023.
To take genetic samples, there is an unavoidable requirement: informed and express consent of the person from whom you are trying to obtain a sample, as established by the Ecuadorian penal code and the country's data protection law. The instructions even include the official consent and non-consent form that must be signed, since refusing is also a right.
If the complaint from mothers like Carmen and the testimonies of prisoners and police officers are true, the Government would not be properly complying with that requirement, in addition to violating the norm.
General Milton Zárate categorically denied that the regulations were not respected. The official data They report that 98% of prisoners signed the authorization document in five prisons: three from the Andean province of Chimborazo, that of Cotopaxi and that of the Penitenciaría del Litoral, in Guayaquil. Only 9 would have refused in Cotopaxi, according to the Government.
Zárate says that the institution he leads promotes “the respect that must be had for prisoners and their right to be informed.”
Zárate also confirmed that sampling was suspended after March 15. “This first phase is a pilot plan and now we are looking for points of improvement. This week we will begin to extract the first genetic profiles and we hope to continue in the future,” said the general. There is still no return date.
Ecuador suspends taking genetic samples from prisoners after criticism of the procedure. The mouth swab was being carried out under pressure from the military who control the prisons and without properly informing the inmates.
✒️@carolina_mella_
https://t.co/jsTQZuCY6t— EL PAÍS America (@elpais_america) March 19, 2024
General Zárate's statement calls into question the version of the SNAI, whose Communication Department stated, on March 19 in an official press chat, that the takeover was continuing normally.
How does the process work and when will the genetic database be ready?
The collection of samples in prisons, according to General Milton Zárate, was added to a prison census that the SNAI began in February 2024 in 16 prison centers.
Before beginning, a forensic official must verify the inmate's data with the SNAI records. Then, must give the prisoner an informed consent document and offer a detailed explanation of why the sample is being taken, why and how it will be processed.
The person can say whether or not they want to obtain their sample. If there is no consent, a prosecutor could request a judge's order and his attorney must be notified. However, in no way can it be forced.
If the inmate accepts, the forensic personnel must fill out a form with images of him, his personal data and information about diseases, among others. Only after this process do experts obtain the sample with a sterile swab. They then store it in a container and label it with the person's name and a code that is assigned to the sample.
The DNA samples from which the genetic profile will be extracted – data contained in the DNA sequences of each human being, different in each person – will be guarded and processed by the genetic laboratory of the National Service of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences in coordination with that of the Ecuadorian Prosecutor's Office. Only accredited users of these two institutions, who participate in genetic matching, will be able to access the database.
We will not be able to take all the samples this year
That's just the first step. Then, the expert will have to extract the genetic profile. But knowing how long it will take to create the database is difficult. The regulations require that sampling in prisons end in December 2024. That is, in nine months. Until now, the process has only been carried out on 12% of the prison population.
“We will not be able to take all the samples this year and we will have to justify it to the Government,” says the general.
The process will be even longer, since not only the genetic data of the imprisoned people will be part of this base, but also police, military, people investigated in criminal proceedings, those who require permission to carry weaponsamong others.
Side A and B of creating the genetic database
In a country where almost 700 prisoners have been murdered from 2018 to March 2024For Fernando Bastias, member of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights from Guayaquil, the existence of a genetic database with data on inmates is “positive because, with it, a systematized order can be maintained in prisons, but exclusively for the purposes established by the regulations and will also allow bodies to be identified in the event of massacres, although we prefer not to imagine more scenarios of violence,” he says.
Lawyer Alexandra Zumárraga, who led government control of prisons between 2010 and 2011, agrees with him. “It is important because with it they can compare and clarify the cases of hundreds of people who have been unjustly convicted.”. In prisons, the vast majority of prisoners do not have a lawyer because they have no resources and they are given disproportionate sentences,” he questions.
But Zumárraga also points to an irrefutable fact in Ecuador: corruption. “This process must be monitored, since they could incriminate a person imprisoned in another crime with their genetic profiling.”
Forensic anthropologist Miguel Moreno explains that an incrimination “is possible because you already have the biological information of this person. The process is not so immediate, because the processing of the sample takes a long time and the comparison also takes a long time, but it is possible.”
Therefore, for the expert it is vital and key that informed consent is complied with: “A prisoner must know that he is handing over his biological identity and that, based on it, his genetic profile will be reconstructed to store it in the database.”but also to use it for or against it, since it is data that will be used in judicial and investigative processes,” he says.
Moreno, who identified several prisoners murdered in the Guayaquil prison in November 2021, adds that the method most applied in this process was identification with fingerprints registered in the police system. Of 65 deaths, “we left only six cases for genetic analysis.”
For him, the creation of the database is progress, but he assures that It is essential to strengthen the training of forensic personnel and, above all, provide adequate information to families. “That is a failure of the system. The families complain because no one gives them information about anything and I know that, because, in 2021, I had to speak with a mother who was demanding answers at the morgue to ask her to be patient, since we were still identifying her son,” she recalls. .
Fernando Bastias thinks the same: “Family members have the right to know what happens to their children in prison and what procedures are being applied to them.”
Meanwhile, official voices such as those of General Milton Zárate ask to trust the process, “which is serious and does not intend to violate their Human Rights, but rather to strengthen the administration of Justice.”
This will be the second genetic database that exists in Ecuador, after the creation of un DNA bank for the search for missing people in the country, achieved by the pressure of hundreds of families.
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