Representatives of the European Parliament and the EU Council will meet on Tuesday morning, 5 February, for what should be, according to a parliamentary source, the last trilogue negotiating session aimed at finalising the new rules establishing the interoperability of European information systems, as proposed by the European Commission at the end of 2017 (see EUROPE 11924).
After a trilogue in December, which allowed stakeholders to agree on the main political nodes of the reform (see EUROPE 12178), namely the methods and supporting documents for law enforcement to access data contained in particular in the common identity data repository (one of the four components of the reform), negotiators have continued their work on the other outstanding issues in recent weeks. As a result, they were able to agree on the date of entry into force of the reform elements. Parliament, like the Commission, initially wanted a relatively strict deadline (all elements of the reform had to be implemented within five years), but Parliament heard arguments from Member States that setting too rigid a date would involve risks, given the scale of the work.
Parliament has therefore agreed that the Commission should keep it regularly informed, in an annual report, of the progress of implementation. Negotiators also found a compromise on the information to be provided to those who would like to have their data corrected. They will have to be informed of the various stages of the procedures and the processing of data will be carried out in accordance with the new European regulation on the protection of personal data, which came into force in May 2018. The Committee on Civil Liberties should, if all goes well, give its opinion on the matter after mid-February, followed by the plenary.
At the end of 2017, the Commission proposed a single search portal, a multiple identity detector, a common identity repository (CIR) and a shared biometric data matching service. Objective: to facilitate access by police forces and law enforcement agencies of Member States to information held by their neighbours and shared in existing systems (SIS, ECRIS-TCN, VIS, entry/exit, Eurodac, ETIAS). (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)