Brussels, 03/07/2008 (Agence Europe) - The main idea that emerged from a hearing at the European Parliament on Monday 30 June 2008 of MEPs and experts on integrated EU border management was that greater openness is required on border security, including Schengen borders. The issues discussed at the hearing included the second generation Schengen Information System (SIS II), due to come on line in September 2009.
The European Parliament's rapporteur on SIS II, Carlos Coelho (EPP-ED, Portugal), pointed out that openness was needed when it comes to implementing the SIS II system, which will lead to the adding of biometric data, because citizens want to know what is going on and he wanted fundamental rights to be respected. In this connection, the chair of the Schengen common control authority, Georges de la Loyère, urged MEPs to remain vigilant vis-à-vis the draft legislation to be submitted to them in order to ensure laws are not broken. Debate then focussed on the three European Commission proposals on integrated external border management (see EUROPE 9600). Dutch ALDE MEP Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, rapporteur on the entry/exist system, regretted that one proposal after another had been published but there was not yet any overall plan. She said the measures all came on top of existing provisions and would have a cost and an impact on the protection of privacy without anyone knowing what their value-added is. Sarah Ludford (ALDE, United Kingdom), who is penning up an own imitative report on profiling, said there is growing interest in everything connected with the profiling of data to detect potential criminals but this could go against the law and even be counterproductive. Her views were shared by the EU Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx, who explained that profiling raised an enormous number of problems because it made generalisations and categorized people and this fed into hunger for more data and suspicions over what people might do rather than what they have actually done. (B.C.)