Criminal convictions of States members (FOI)

​Request

Can you please let me know what proportion of the 49 elected members of the States in 2018 have declared criminal convictions?

If you could please split this down for the following groups: Constables, Senators and Deputies.

Can I also have the same figures for the elected members following the previous three elections too?

Response

To answer this request would require us to process the personal data of the elected members of the States consisting of criminal records which we have collected for various law enforcement purposes.

Responding to a request under the Freedom of information (Jersey) Law 2011 (FOI Law) is not a law enforcement purpose. Article 13(2) of the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018 (DP Law) states that “personal data collected for any of the law enforcement purposes may not be processed for a purpose that is not a law enforcement purpose unless the processing is authorized by law”. Since we have not been authorized by law to process the required criminal records for the purposes of responding to this request under the FOI Law, we are prohibited from carrying out the necessary processing by Article 13(2) of the DP Law.

The information is therefore absolutely exempt under Article 29(a) (Other prohibitions of restrictions) of the FOI Law because disclosure is prohibited by or under an enactment, and we decline to supply the information requested.

Articles applied

Article 29 Other prohibitions or restrictions

Information is absolutely exempt information if the disclosure of the information by the scheduled public authority holding it –

(a) is prohibited by or under an enactment;

(b) is incompatible with a European Union or an international obligation that applies to Jersey; or

(c) would constitute or be punishable as a contempt of court.

The Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018:

The Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018

Article 13 of the DP Law as substituted by Schedule 1 paragraph 7 when processing for law enforcement purposes:

Article 13 Purposes of processing

(1) Personal data collected for a law enforcement purpose may be processed for any other law enforcement purpose (whether by the controller that collected the data or by another controller) provided that –

(a) the controller is authorized by law to process the data for the other purpose; and

(b) the processing is necessary and proportionate to that other purpose.

(2) Personal data collected for any of the law enforcement purposes may not be processed for a purpose that is not a law enforcement purpose unless the processing is authorized by law.

(3) The controller must process personal data in a way that makes appropriate distinctions between data relating to different categories of data subjects, including persons suspected of committing, or convicted of, an offence and victims and witnesses, whose data may be processed for different purposes.