Well firstly, that points certainly at the need for international standards on biometrics that would move in the same direction so that we can have the same technical requirements.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
With the enhancements to the security of the passport document itself that biometric technology will bring, it is time to make equivalent enhancements to the process of establishing identity before issuing passports.
I have very real concerns about the civil liberties implications of ultimately requiring every resident to submit themselves for compulsory fingerprinting or some other biometric test.
We measure very carefully what the positives are and I think it is less than one tenth of one percent, so we are very pleased with the accuracy of our biometric checks and we continue to monitor that.
Universities ought to be aware of the degree they would want to accept funding from governments like China to work on, say, face recognition technology.
We should have a system of licensing and registration, we should treat firearms the same way that automobiles are treated so that people have to pass a safety test.
Many other countries have already banned human cloning, and there are efforts at the UN to make such a ban universal.
I don't deny that there are problems in the intelligence world, but I would argue that in the UK we try to uphold the highest standards in the world.
The standards to get in are very high. We don't want to lower those standards.
We don't need a nation that has national identity cards.
The respect for human rights is nowadays not so much a matter of having international standards, but rather questions of compliance with those standards.