Brussels, 13/10/2004 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission has proposed to step up exchanges of information on criminal sentencing. The Council's proposed decision, which was adopted by written procedure on Wednesday and published on Thursday, is a very first step towards creating a network of criminal records in the 25 Member States. It contains two planks. The first provides that each Member State must be informed immediately if one of its nationals is found guilty of a crime in another Member State. Until now, by virtue of the European Convention of 1959 on legal cooperation, this information is only exchanged once a year. The second provides for exchanges of information taken from criminal records to be accelerated: Member States must respond within five days. These exchanges will be done on the basis of a standard form, available in all the languages of the European Union.
Each Member State must appoint a central authority, to be responsible for communicating all sentencing of nationals from other Member States, and sending and receiving requests for information from criminal records. The Member States should undertake to implement these measures by 30 June 2005.
The idea of creating a European criminal record was relaunched after the attacks of 11 March in Madrid, and then by this summer's discovery of the Fourniret case, from the name of the multiple sex offender who managed to get a job supervising children in a school canteen in Belgium, despite already having been brought to justice in France. Wednesday's proposal may appear not to go far enough in this case. Its first plank extends only to the nationals of a Member State, not its residents. It makes no attempt to harmonise either the content of the criminal records of each country, nor the length of time a crime should stay on it. Moreover, the legislation can vary enormously from country to country.
To support its communication, which it will present at the end of the year, the European Commission refers to more ambitious plans for a computerised information exchange system on criminal sentencing. It considers that it will take several years to put the system into place, for technical reasons- each country has its own system- and legal reasons, such as differences in legislation, access conditions, data protection… France, Germany and Spain have decided to launch a three-way system, which will take longer for 25. Their three justice ministers announced their intentions of linking their criminal records systems in a single network in mid-July, to exchange information and requests for extracts from criminal records electronically (EUROPE of 20 July).
Further to the Fourniret affair, the European Commission had planned to include the obligation to check the criminal records of other Member States in this initial proposal, as well as those of the country in question, when "a Member State makes access to a particular job involving contact with children conditional upon checking that person's criminal record", reads a press release from mid-July. The proposed decision adopted on Wednesday does not refer to this issue.