Brussels, 02/12/2004 (Agence Europe) - The Justice and Home Affairs Council made progress on Thursday on exchanges of information on criminal sentences. Ministers approved the broad outlines of the proposal presented in mid-October by the European Commission, but have still to agree on the exact information to be transmitted and how the requests will be formulated (see EUROPE of 14 October).
Under Thursday's agreement, each Member State must be informed at once 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 exchanged only once a year. Furthermore, information exchanges taken from criminal records will be speeded up: the Member States will have a maximum of ten days to respond. In each State, a central authority will be in charge of sending and receiving the information. The information will be transmitted via a standard form, on which the Member States have yet to agree. There are still some sensitive issues to be tackled, particularly that of deciding on the information to be sent- some Member States have several criminal registers, depending on the type of crime.
This text has "somewhat limited scope", but it is an "important first step", said the new European Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs, Franco Frattini. The Commission had announced a second proposal for the end of the year, for a more ambitious information exchange system on criminal prosecutions, which will take years to set in place. This proposal will now be made "maybe in the first half of 2005", announced Commissioner Frattini. France, Germany and Spain announced their intention of breaking new ground in July, by putting their criminal registers on a network in 2005 (EUROPE of 20 July).
The Belgian Minister for Justice, Laurette Onkelinx, welcomed this first step, but finds it "inadequate". At the end of October, Belgium presented a proposal to add to that of the European Commission, to ensure that a ban on paedophiles from working in childcare is applied no matter in which State the person in question resides. The Member States would be obliged to include any ban on carrying out a profession in the criminal records of the person prosecuted. The ban would be automatically communicated if one State asks another for an extract from their criminal record.