Ukraine prepares law to unify its biometric surveillance systems

Ukraine is preparing a law that will help it unify its public video surveillance system – and sparking concerns among non-governmental organizations about the extent of biometric data collection.

The draft Law on a Unified System of Video Monitoring of Public Security, known as Bill No. 11031, was submitted to the Ukraine parliament in February. The bill is an attempt to bring order into the Eastern European country’s already existing surveillance systems, including Safe City projects, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Leonid Tymchenko explained to local media while presenting the law.

The draft bill aims to be compliant with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as well as local data processing regulations. The proposal, however, is already sparking concern over the amount of data that the system will collect.

“The provisions of the draft law are written intentionally or accidentally in such a way to legitimize the process of collecting and analyzing all video surveillance data in public places in real-time, in particular through the uncontrolled use of artificial intelligence,” Ukrainian NGO Institute of Mass Information (IMI) writes in a brief.

Such a system may clash with both GDPR and the EU’s incoming AI Act.

The law aims to introduce unified technical requirements and rules for information exchange between different Ukrainian state agencies. The video surveillance system will be able to tap into the National Biometric Verification and Identification System of Ukraine to perform facial recognition as well as other state registers, including those for citizens, vehicles, taxpayers and those related to migration, according to an analysis of the bill conducted by fact-checking platform VoxUkraine.

The unified system will be centrally supervised by the Ministry of Internal Affairs alongside regional and local administrations. In May 2023, for instance, Kyiv police demonstrated its facial recognition video surveillance system, noting that the region currently has over 1,800 cameras.

Other critics have questioned the vulnerability of Ukraine’s video surveillance camera systems to hacking and spying from Russian and Chinese special forces. Last year, Ukrainian NGO Underdog laid claims that commercial cameras from Chinese surveillance equipment makers Hikvision and Dahua have aided Russia in pinpointing Ukraine’s anti-aircraft defense attacks.

According to a January report from Radio Free Europe citing data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the majority of the country’s cameras, 74 percent, are manufactured by Hikvision and Dahua. Local authorities are currently managing about 24,000 Dahua and Hikvision cameras working in video surveillance systems similar to the Safe City systems, the report notes.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  legislation  |  Ukraine  |  video surveillance