Several legal actions were launched on Tuesday 14 May in Germany against the European PNR, the European directive obliging airlines to collect data on air passengers to and from non-Member States and, in some cases, on intra-European flights, the association Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (GFF) announced. The collective deplores the fact that millions of data points are collected by the processing units set up by the directive, “regardless of the threat level”.
The GFF has therefore decided to take legal action before the Wiesbaden Administrative Court and various local courts against the automated transfer of passenger name record data by airlines to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), it explained in a statement.
“The large-scale storage and analysis of the flights of all international passengers without any reason constitutes a violation of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights”, according to Malte Spitz, Secretary General of the GFF and member of the German Greens party.
Malte Spitz is one of six plaintiffs from different EU Member States whose lawsuits are being coordinated by the GFF, the collective added, the purpose of the proceedings being for the EU Court of Justice to examine the validity of this directive.
This announcement comes at a time when the German media had recently reported on considerable amounts of PNR data collected by German companies that eventually resulted in nearly 99.7% of false ‘alerts’ or false ‘hits’. Deputy Sophie in't Veld (ALDE, Netherlands) referred the matter to the Commission on this occasion (see EUROPE 12243/21).
Customs
The directive was due to be transposed by May 2018. According to a note from the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU dated 29 April, as of 9 April, 22 Member States had reported its full transposition. In this note, the Presidency explains that PNR data originally designed for counter-terrorism purposes are also being used by the customs services of the Member States. The Presidency explains that PNR data can also be useful for customs activities and risk management in passenger traffic. The purpose of the questionnaire it sends to Member States is to find out to what extent customs authorities use these PNR data. For more information on the initiative (in German): https://bit.ly/2W3GHuK. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)