During their meeting in Brussels on Thursday 7 March, the interior ministers of the 28 EU member states will focus on the state of transposition of the European Passenger Name Record (PNR) Directive (2016/681), a programme for collecting the data of air passengers on flights to and from the EU for the purposes of counter-terrorism and fighting serious crime.
The PNR Directive entered into force in 2016 and is due to be transposed by 25 May (see EUROPE 11537, 11532). The member states will then be asked to say where they are and whether they can confirm that they have implemented all the measures necessary for achieving this transposition, a preparatory note seen by EUROPE states.
According to this note, the member states have made "substantial progress" over recent months towards this transposition – for example, on setting up their PNR units. The Commission released funding to help the member states set this system up (see EUROPE 11715) but there are still legal and operational aspects to be settled, the note states (although it does not mention which countries are targeted).
According to the latest situational analysis available to the Commission on 16th February 2018, nine member states are on the way to finalising transposition or are at an "advanced stage", and three other member states have currently notified the Commission of their national transposition measures.
Thirteen countries are still at an "intermediate stage": - four have set up their PNR unit but are not able to collect PNR data due to the lack of a legal basis for doing so; - the remaining nine countries are at different stages of setting up their PNR units or of activating technical solutions to deal with the data collected.
In nine member states, the draft national transposition legislation seems to be in a phase prior to parliamentary examination, and in three others, the examination of the legislative draft is underway.
In addition, another group of five EU countries is only at the start of the transposition phase. These countries still need to define the framework of their PNR units or to define the draft legislation or technical modalities for dealing with the data.
The note underlines the need to transpose by 25 May this PNR Directive, which provides for the exchange of information between member states as well as with Europol.
The European ministers will have an exchange of views and are due to say how they intend to finalise this transposition. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks that took place in France in 2015, the European ministers had insisted on the European Parliament adopting this measure urgently. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)