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When the States Assembly agreed to amend The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Law (2003) during the tail-end of last year, it agreed to increase the maximum sentence for RIPL offences from two to five years.
RIPL notices gives law enforcement legal backing to request access to a defendant’s phone. Refusal to provide a pin code is an offence that can now lead to sentences of up to five years, depending on the seriousness of the underlying criminality.
The Criminal Justice (Miscellaneous Amendment) Ordinance, 2022, was put before the States late last year and included a raft of amendments to various laws relating to law enforcement.
“The purpose of the amendments is to improve the effectiveness of the Bailiwick’s criminal justice framework in a number of areas,” said the Committee for Home Affairs.
Under the RIPL a police officer can serve a notice to a defendant requesting access to their phone. Failure to comply with the notice used to lead to a possible maximum sentence of two years.
"In practice, notices are most commonly served on persons suspected of involvement in criminality in order to obtain the passwords to their mobile phones or other electronic devices that may contain information relevant to the crime under investigation,” said Home Affairs in an explanatory note attached to the Policy Letter last year.
“This particularly arises with cases of suspected drug trafficking. However, experience to date is that because the maximum terms of imprisonment for failure tocomply with a notice are lower than those for the suspected criminality, many suspects choose not tocomply with the notice and to serve the resulting prison sentence, rather than to reveal information that could expose them to prosecution for the suspected criminality.
"This is an increasingly common occurrence which has the potential seriously to hamper efforts to tackle proceeds –generating crime and related money laundering activity, as well as making it more difficult to trace and recover criminal proceeds. It would be considerably reduced if the maximum prison sentences for failure to comply with a notice were increased so as to bring them more in line with the sentence a person could expect to receive for the underlying criminality. I therefore advise that the maximum sentence should be increased to five years for conviction on indictment and two years for summary conviction.”
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