Staff Reporter :The High Court (HC) has rejected a writ petition filed challenging legality of the police’s move to collect information from the tenants and the house owners. A HC bench comprising Justice Moyeenul Islam Chowdhury and Justice Iqbal Kabir passed the order on Sunday morning saying that the Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) can take any step under the DMP Rules, 2006 to prevent any terrorist activity in the city.On March 3, Supreme Court lawyer Jyotirmoy Barua filed the petition with the HC, two days after he sent a legal notice requesting the government to refrain from seeking the information.Lawyer Jotirmoy Barua told the media that he would move an appeal in the Supreme Court against the HC order.According to the Constitution, a citizen has every right to maintain secrecy of his/her personal life.On the other hand, according to section 42 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, every citizen must help the police in investigation work. Under this section, police can seek information from anyone and citizens must cooperate. If necessary, the police can also take action under this section if a citizen deliberately refuses to cooperate.DMP sources said that the tenants’ information would be collected and maintained by the city’s respective police stations and shared through a central DMP database. The information would be stored categorised under respective neighbourhoods.The initiative to create a tenant database was taken by the DMP Headquarters in the past, but the process did not succeed at that time due to several reasons. The move had been taken afresh recently after the law enforcers raided two houses in Badda and Mohammadpur areas and found huge explosives in the flats used as militant dens.The DMP on February 29 announced that it had been collecting “identification information” about landlords and tenants since November last year and asked all to provide the information by March 15.
