On Monday 29 May, the Commissioner for the Security Union, Sir Julian King, told the MEPs of the committee on civil liberties (LIBE) that there would be no gigantic database centre for data currently contained in the various European information systems. He made this announcement during the presentation of the final report of the high-level group on the interoperability of information systems.
In 2016, the EU home affairs ministers and the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Dimitris Avramopoulos, suggested that the competent law enforcement authorities could obtain, in a single click and for any given search, relevant information in all existing databases, such as the Schengen Information System, the Eurodac system, the forthcoming Entry/Exit mechanism or ETIAS (EU travel authorisation equivalent to the American system, ESTA). At the time, the aim was to move towards a single interface (see EUROPE 11537).
On Monday, however, King said that what “we are not proposing a gigantic database in which everything is interconnected”. Under our approach, “every database would have its own limitations in terms of access or retention”. He stressed that there would therefore be no inter-connectivity between all of the systems.
Technical discussions are set to continue in the coming months, but the Commission has already announced that it would come forward with a legislative initiative on systems interoperability. Next month, the Commissioner said, it will present two initiatives, one to reinforce the mandate of the European agency eu-LISA and the other to bolster the ECRIS proposal of January 2016, to extend the information in criminal records to third-country nationals.
The Commission started work on interoperability in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2015, which highlighted the shortcomings of the member states in sharing the relevant information and collecting quality data. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)