In Luxembourg on Thursday 12 October, European justice ministers discussed technical aspects of the proposal to update the European information system on police records (ECRIS) and create a centralised ECRIS-TCN in order to be able to rapidly find out whether any member state holds information about convictions of a third-country national.
The Estonian Presidency of the Council of the EU wants to reach a general approach on the text in December and Estonian justice minister Urmas Reinsalu urged ministers to give their views on two draft compromises: - including in the system details of people with dual EU and non-EU nationality; - collecting digital fingerprints only for people condemned to be imprisoned.
As announced by this newsletter, the first compromise was backed by a majority of member states and the talks focussed on an opinion from the Council of the EU’s legal service about discrimination between different types of double nationality (see EUROPE 11881). The opinion states that including double-nationality individuals in the system (those with the nationality of a non-EU country and also that of a member state) had to go hand-in-hand with including strictly European double-nationalities (possessing the nationality of two EU member states). The general feeling is that people convicted of crimes who hold double nationality can deliberately make it difficult to identify the country that holds information about their police records.
EU Justice Commissioner Věra Jourová says it isn’t necessary to strictly include European double nationalities in the new ECRIS-TCN system since they are already covered by ECRIS, and she called for the exchange of information not be made even more complicated.
Lining up with the Commission’s approach, the Spanish, polish and Bulgarian, Portuguese and Swedish ministers called for double European nationalities not to be included. However, feeling that as broad a scope as possible would boost the system’s effectiveness, Belgium, Romania, Finland, Luxembourg and Latvia followed the line of the Council’s legal service.
French justice minister Nicole Belloubet – backed by the Austrian and Dutch justice ministers – said the Council’s legal opinion had to be examined without any haste and an impact assessment carried out into the number of people convicted of crimes who hold purely European double nationality, since this would be useful for future debate at the working group.
The question of collecting digital fingerprints was a subject of greater consensus among the member states. Reinsalu welcomed the majority support for the presidency’s proposals to restrict the collection of digital fingerprints to cases where people are sentenced to prison, in other words, for the more serious crimes.
The Portuguese and Lithuanian ministers opposed this, pointing out that there were criminal records for terrorists in the member states but they were often only for minor crimes.
Commissioner Věra Jourová said the collection of digital fingerprints should be as wide as possible. For people with non-EU passports, fingerprints are often the only solution for verifying identity since travel documents are often unreliable, whether for serious or less serious cries. The compromise presented by the presidency was, she said, a good basis for discussion but doesn’t go far enough. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)