Forensic DNA Databases and the Emergence of Carceral Human Rights in South Africa

This article considers changing discourses of the risks of having or not having a national DNA database at a moment of global expansion of these technologies in the postcolonial global South. It focuses on debates about South African’s National Forensic DNA Database from 2009 to 2023. It introduces the concept of carceral human rights to analyse shifts in DNA database debates and how those shifts have changed how human rights are imagined and whom they are imagined to be for. It demonstrates that concerns about the need to protect the rights of the accused and convicted have become eclipsed by arguments, in the name of a reimagined human rights, to protect an always potentially victimised public. This article argues that the emergence of carceral human rights in legitimising and expanding DNA databases has changed what human rights might mean for the future more broadly, to the detriment of marginalised people.