Luxembourg, 14/04/2005 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday Member States rejected the European Commission's proposal to set up a list of prison convictions made in the European Union, preferring to follow a bilateral approach. The Council did decide, however, to keep an index of convictions for third country nationals.
For convictions involving European nationals, Member States will stick to bilateral contacts but possibly by using an electronic interconnection pilot project utilised by Germany, France, Belgium and
Spain. They did, however, make headway by agreeing on the principle of obligation for the country of the nationality of the person convicted in another Member State to include this condemnation in their legal record. Currently, this is not done by all Member States, underlined the president of the JHA Council, Luc Frieden. It is for this reason, and because this obligation will allow for any previous convictions to be known, even if there is no common register, that the European Commission supports the presidency compromise, indicated Commissioner Franco Frattini. The Commission will present the two proposals before the summer - one on the obligation to register convictions in the indexes of the country of nationality and the other on the common register listing the convictions of third country nationals.
The proposal for a European index was seen by the Commission as a first step towards a European legal record register. During the informal Council in Luxembourg, Member States already displayed their acute reservations on this proposal (EUROPE 8877), which they threw out today. Luc Frieden recognised, “I supported the idea of a European legal record register but I am realistic, the European legal record register is not getting any agreement on it today”. Frieden underlined that it would be better to go forward “in a stage by stage” way. He admitted that rather than having a proposal that involved all Member States, an interconnection of legal record registers “would attach itself to the pilot project of the four countries”. This electronic interconnection project is expected to become operational by the end of the year, announced French, German, Belgian and Spanish justice ministers. The German minister, Brigitte Zypries declared, “We will be proposing that every country joins the system” but her French counterpart, Dominique Perben was more circumspect, declaring to a group of journalists that, “we are not ruling out its expansion bit by bit”. He indicated that Poland would soon be joining this project.
The European index was proposed by the European Commission in a White Paper in January as one of the measures to respond to the poor transmission of information on legal records between Member States, cruelly brought to light by the Fourniret affair last year. Fourniret had worked in a school canteen in Belgium without the authorities knowing that he had been convicted in France for sexual offences against minors. The Commission proposed in October proposals for speeding up information exchange. The Council reached a political agreement a month an a half ago on this first stage in the coordination of legal records. Each Member State will have to be informed immediately of the conviction of one of its nationals in another Member State. Member States will have to answer within a maximum of ten days to requests for extracts from the record (EUROPE 8840). Questions that Member States sill have to resolve in order to obtain good cooperation include the length time for keeping convictions in a legal record and the way in which to ensure a clear understanding of the scale of a conviction made in one Member State and its equivalence in another.