Governance & Safeguards
Lawful authority, privacy protection and a defensible audit trail underpin every Track & Trace deployment.
Responsible by design
Electronic monitoring engages an individual’s right to privacy, and its use must be lawful, proportionate and accountable. Track & Trace supports the institutions that hold lawful authority and builds every programme on clear legal basis, court authorisation and controlled access to data.
Legal & procedural
- Clear legal basis and court authorisation for each case
- Proportionate use, suitable to the individual and the order
- Defined roles between the project and the supervising authority
- Alignment with local justice-sector frameworks
Data & rights
- Privacy protection and human-rights compliance
- Controlled, role-based access to monitoring data
- Retention discipline and a defensible audit trail
- Transparency to authorised oversight bodies
The standards a lawful programme must meet
Because monitoring interferes with privacy, it can only be justified where it is lawful, necessary and proportionate, and where personal data is protected to a recognised standard. Track & Trace is designed to operate within the obligations that apply at international, regional and national level.
International standards
The right to privacy is protected under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. For non-custodial measures specifically, the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for Non-custodial Measures — the Tokyo Rules (1990) — require that such measures are prescribed by law, applied with minimum intervention, respect the dignity of the individual, restrict rights no further than authorised, and give the individual a right of complaint to an independent authority. In jurisdictions bound by the European Convention on Human Rights — including the United Kingdom, a long-standing user of electronic monitoring — any interference with privacy must also satisfy a proportionality test: a clear legal basis, a legitimate aim, necessity, and safeguards against arbitrary use.
African & regional framework
At regional level, the right to privacy draws on the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The African Union’s Malabo Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection — adopted in 2014 and in force since June 2023 — requires member states to establish data-protection frameworks and independent authorities, and to balance the rights of data subjects with legitimate state functions.
East African & Ugandan law
Uganda was the first East African country to enact a dedicated data-protection law. The right to privacy is guaranteed by Article 27 of the 1995 Constitution and given effect by the Data Protection and Privacy Act 2019 and the Data Protection and Privacy Regulations 2021, enforced by the Personal Data Protection Office within the National Information Technology Authority, Uganda (NITA-U). The Act requires that personal data is collected for a specific, lawful purpose, limited to what is necessary, kept secure, and subject to data-subject rights of access and correction — with transfers outside Uganda permitted only where equivalent protection exists. Neighbouring jurisdictions have followed, including Kenya’s Data Protection Act 2019 and Tanzania’s Personal Data Protection Act 2022.
Within this framework, monitoring is only ever a tool operated under the lawful authority of a court or supervising body — never a substitute for it.
A project platform, not an authority
Track & Trace is not a sentencing authority, law-enforcement body or custodial operator, and this website does not operate tracking devices or process offender data. The technical controls that support these safeguards are described in our technology overview.