Myanmar: Human Rights Analysis of Biometric Digital ID Systems thereby enabling differential treatment. In very serious cases, such ID systems can facilitate grave human rights abuses. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination lists “[c]ompulsory identification against the will of members of particular groups, including the use of identity cards indicating ethnicity” as a potential indicator for the presence of genocide.15 Overall, given the serious risk of discrimination, a number of human rights bodies and experts have advised against including protected grounds as identifiers in ID systems.16 At a minimum, where such identifiers serve to enable enforcement of discriminatory laws or operate in a context where there is strong systemic discrimination, their inclusion in ID systems may well result in discrimination in practice. In such instances, these identifiers should not be included in ID systems. If identifiers such as ethnicity or religion are included in ID systems, individuals should have freedom to self-select these characteristics. In addition, the options under them should not be limited to a closed list which excludes certain groups since this may constitute discrimination against groups which are not listed through failing to acknowledge their existence. For example, various UN experts opposed Iran’s removal of an “other” religion category on ID documents, which left only four officially recognised religions.17 Similarly, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion and Belief has noted that even if including religion in an identity system was acceptable, limiting the choice to three religions was discriminatory and a violation of international law.18 Better practice suggests that such identifiers should not be included at all, but if they are included, self-identification should applied. 1.3 Privacy The right to privacy is guaranteed by Article 12 of the UDHR and Article 17 of the ICCPR. According to the latter, the right to privacy includes the right to be free from arbitrary or unlawful interference with one’s privacy, family, home or correspondence. It is based on the idea that individuals should enjoy a “private sphere” of autonomous development and interaction that is free 15 Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Decision to Follow-Up to the Declaration on the Prevention of Genocide: Indicators of Patterns of Systematic and Massive Racial Discrimination, 14 October 2005, U.N. Doc. CERD/C/67/1. Available at: https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/CERD/indicators_for_genocide.doc. 16 Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: Indonesia, 15 August 2007, para. 21 (recommending that Indonesia remove religion as a category), available at: https://www.ecoi.net/en/file/local/1079411/470_1219158150_cerd-c-idn-co3.pdf; European Court of Human Rights, Sinan Işık v.Turkey, Application No. 21924/05, 2 February 2010 (finding that a mandatory religion field was a violation of freedom of religion), available at: http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/tur?i=001-97087; and Abdelfattah Amor, Special Rapporteur on the question of religious intolerance, Visit by the Special Rapporteur to Pakistan, 2 January 1996, U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/1996/95/Add.1, paras. 23-24, 45 and 85, available at: https://undocs.org/E/CN.4/1996/95/Add.1. 17 Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Special Rapporteur on minority issues and Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, Letter to the Government of Iran, 17 February 2020. Available at: https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=25069. 18 Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, Report to the Commission on Human Rights, 16 January 2004, UN Doc. E/CN.4/2004/63, para. 42. Available at: https://undocs.org/E/CN.4/2004/63. -4-