The Hate Crime Advocacy Service (HCAS) provides hate crime victims with free and confidential emotional and practical assistance and information about the criminal justice system. Trained staff deliver this assistance throughout Northern Ireland.
HCAS is a “controller” and also a “processor” of personal data and fully committed to ensuring all personal data and sensitive personal data is handled fairly and lawfully and with due regard to confidentiality, dignity and respect.
We only collect and store personal data with your consent. We must collect and process certain types of personal data about our service users in order to operate and provide services, for example:
The personal data is held so we can contact and assess service users to assist us:
In the event that we utilise the services of third party providers to assist us in the delivery of our stated activities we will ensure there are legal agreements in place to govern the limited usage of that data.
We also hold personal data on staff, volunteers, service suppliers and other professional business contacts.
Typically, we will collect contact details i.e. name, address, telephone number and email address but only if you allow us to do so. We will also collect any other applicable information which will help support victims of hate crime e.g. what happened to you and notes of any discussions we have with you.
We will not collect any personal data from you we do not need in order to provide and oversee our service to you.
Personal data held by HCAS will not be shared with any other agency without your consent unless we have to because of the law or we have justifiable concerns about your well-being.
We will only keep your personal data for as long as we need it to help us to provide a service to you or until you tell us you no longer wish us to hold your personal data in line with our Records, Data and Retention Policy.
If at any point you believe the information we process on you is incorrect you can request to see this information and have it corrected or deleted. If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact our Data Protection Officer who will investigate the matter.
Individuals can see the personal data we store and a subject access request can be made through our Data Protection Officer.
Our Data Protection Officer is available at IT@victimsupportni.org.uk.
If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your personal data not in accordance with the law you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
The ICO can be contacted at the address below:
The Information Commissioner’s Office – Northern Ireland
3rd Floor
14 Cromac Place,
Belfast
BT7 2JB
Telephone: 028 9027 8757 / 0303 123 1114