Brussels, 18/12/2007 (Agence Europe) - The EU and the United States agree on the principle aimed at making their databases for combating terrorism and illegal immigration interoperable. This is the main result of an EU-US ministerial meeting devoted to homeland security and justice, held in Washington on 11 December. Commissioner Franco Frattini above all said he was in favour of having interoperable systems on electronic registration of entry and exit from the territory, and ETA (Electronic Travel Authorisation) systems. While the United States has already chosen implementation of such systems on its territory, the Commission plans to make proposals in this field in February 2008. Networking could even, in time, concern transfer of passenger name records (PNRs) and be based on a recent project put forward by the Commission (European PNR), Michael Chertoff, US Secretary for Security, intimated. “The more we can share under a set of agreed principles, the better off people all over the world are going to be”, stressed Mr Chertoff. In parallel to this, the two men discussed the need to reach a common reference framework on data protection, without which there would be far more doubt about the networking of police databases. Mr Frattini said that the ministerial meeting, to be organised under the Slovenian EU presidency, would seek to reach a final political agreement in this field, above all on the basis of work by the EU-US High Level Group on data protection. (B.C.)