Nubian Rights Forum & 2 others v Attorney General & 6 others; Child Welfare Society & 9 others (Interested Parties) [2020] eKLR 187. In any event, according to Mr. Kegoro, the form currently being used by the Respondents to collect data has no basis in law as it has clearly been developed without the legislative oversight required under the Interpretations and General Provisions Act Cap 2 of Laws of Kenya. 188. Responding to the claim by Ms. Janet Mucheru in her affidavit sworn on 26th February 2019 on behalf of the 2nd and 3rd Respondents that NIIMs seeks to protect children from trafficking, Mr. Kegoro suggested that this was not likely to be the outcome. He averred that in the course of its work with stateless communities like the Shona who are predominantly children of descendants from Zimbabwe, the 2nd Petitioner had established that Shona children, despite being registered within six months from birth as required by the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, are not issued with birth certificates. 189. Mr. Kegoro noted that according to organisations like United Nations Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the International Labor Organization (ILO), undocumented children, children of migrants and stateless children are generally marginalised and at a very high risk of statelessness. It was his view that as structured under the Act, NIIMS applies strictly to adults and cannot offer protection from trafficking to undocumented and stateless children as averred by Ms. Mucheru. 190. In his view, the impugned amendments have not addressed the underlying structural issues facing stateless and other undocumented persons. It would therefore merely entrench and exacerbate the problems that these groups face in the digital sphere. He contended that the fact that the NIIMS system is entrenched in a law that does not apply to stateless persons, refugees and aliens is a clear indication that the impugned amendments had the intent to continue marginalising stateless persons rather than recognizing and granting them valid legal identity. 191. Mr. Kegoro averred that any legal regime for identification of persons in the digital age should, according to the World Bank, comply with the Principles on Identification For Sustainable Development: Toward the Digital Age. Such principles include ensuring universal coverage for individuals from birth to death, free from discrimination; removing barriers to access and usage and disparities in the availability of information and technology; and establishing a robust, unique, secure, and accurate identity. 192. It was his averment that the impugned amendments have placed emphasis on data collection and retrieval with limited or no regulation of critical facets of data protection relating to data minimization, collection, purpose limitation, and retention limitation that are the backbone of an effective data and privacy protection legislation. A worse failing of the amendments, in his view, was that not a single standard had been prescribed by the impugned amendments and none acknowledged for the purpose. It was his averment that this lacuna falls far short of the guaranteed standard of the right to privacy and comparative standards in data privacy and registration laws in jurisdictions that have proposed similar laws for collection of personal information. 193. Mr. Kegoro averred that the impugned amendments, held against the standards set out in UNESCO’s International Declaration on Human Genetic Data, the AU Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection (Chapter II thereof), the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and comparable national legislation from other jurisdictions, had been purposefully designed to collect personal information without safeguards for protections and mitigation of attendant risks. He reiterated the general motif of the 2nd Petitioner’s grievance against the impugned legislation that it makes wide and ambiguous provisions for collection of personal data but does not provide substantive law for the protection of data retrieval, processing, storage, use and disclosure. 194. Mr. Kegoro gave several illustrations with respect to the lacuna in the law. He noted, first, that by their generality, the amendments compel data collection from everyone without regard to the unique differences inherent in a modern society; and that the impugned law does not anticipate the special circumstances that may call for special regulations in the collection of data from, adults, children, persons with disability or convicted criminals, http://www.kenyalaw.org - Page 29/174