Brussels, 30/05/2012 (Agence Europe) - Succeeding in the objective of the common European asylum system (CEAS) pledged for the end of 2012 by acceding to one of the Council's most dearly held requests. This is the strategy selected by the European Commission, which on 30 May presented a proposed regulation aiming to revise the functioning of the Eurodac database, the system for the comparison of digital fingerprints of asylum seekers and of a number of categories of illegal immigrants, and to which the national police forces may now have access.
In place since 2003, the main aim of Eurodac is to facilitate the application of the Dublin II regulation by determining the country of the EU responsible for examining an asylum application. By comparing fingerprints, the member states can verify whether an asylum seeker has already made an application in another country of the EU and whether an asylum seeker has illegally entered EU territory. Access to Eurodac by national police forces and Europol has long been requested by the member states, which made this a partial condition for their efforts on other dossiers of the “Asylum package”, such as the revision of the Dublin II regulation and the creation of an early warning mechanism (the Commission did not win out over its clause to suspend transfers of asylum seekers from country to country), the qualifications and hosting conditions directives and the “procedures” directive for asylum matters. The Commission, which was somewhat reluctant to start with, wishing to obtain concessions from the Council, finally agreed to put a new regulation on the table in order to facilitate negotiations and respect the deadline of the end of this year, which is now felt to be achievable, explained a source close to the competent commissioner, Cecilia Malmström, who also stated that concrete safeguards have been set in place to create a framework for access to Eurodac by the national police forces.
This means that access to this database - and any crossover between national data and those held by Eurodac - will be possible only as a last resort, when the police have failed to find the required information on their own systems or those of other member states, in line with the provisions of the so-called Prüm decision. Access to Eurodac will additionally be authorised only in the event of suspicion of serious crimes or terrorism on the part of an asylum seeker. The ability to consult Eurodac will by no means be systematic, the Commission explains, and will be limited to very specific cases. The new proposal aims mainly to make life easier for the European police forces, who until now have had to put requests to their counterparts to find out whether they hold any information on any individual asylum seeker. Access to Eurodac will therefore save them time and allow them to determine directly the member state they need to consult and through which the suspect arrived. The Commission goes on to explain that the indications provided by the Eurodac database will be very limited and will consist only of informing the requester which member state will be able to provide more details on an asylum seeker, as Eurodac contains only “a very few elements” on the situations of asylum seekers, a spokesperson to Malmström explained. Eurodac does not give names; the data transmitted by the member states refer to the country of the EU of origin, the sex of the person, the place and date of their asylum application, the place and date on which the person was apprehended or the date on which the fingerprints were taken. No data on minors under the age of 14 are included. The proposed regulation will be presented to the home affairs ministers of the EU27 at their forthcoming meeting in Luxembourg on 7 June. (SP/transl.fl)