Brussels, 08/09/2009 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 9 September, the European Commission will present a legislative proposal to enable EU27 police forces and Europol to access Eurodac stored fingerprints (the European database stocking asylum seekers' fingerprints). In an effort to tackle the terrorist threat and to fight against an increase in more serious crime, the European Commission intends to take new measures to improve the European Union's internal security by adopting two legislative instruments. The first measure consists of an amendment to the current Eurodac regulation, which for the time being is exclusively based on the first pillar (Community), and elements of the third pillar (police and legal cooperation) are expected to be added later. The other measure is a draft decision defining the modalities for police access to Eurodac. These measures aim to foster cooperation between the law enforcement agencies in member states, so that they can exchange important information. Eurodac contains fingerprints from third country nationals who have crossed the border of a member state illegally.
In a second proposal, the Commission plans to authorise the comparison of fingerprints in Eurodac with those stored by the national law enforcement authorities or Europol, in an effort to prevent, detect and investigate acts of terrorism or serious crime, including the trafficking of human beings and drugs. This also includes changes to the Eurodac system, so as to guarantee research being carried out on a “latent” basis - in other words, on clues left at the scene of a crime. In this context, the proposal aims to establish a procedure for allowing law enforcement authorities to request comparisons with Eurodac data and the conditions determining how such requests can be made. Member states will have to designate which authorities are authorised to access Eurodac. Another authority will be in charge of verifying whether the appropriate conditions are met for these requests and this authority will authorise requests for comparison to be sent to the national access point, which will subsequently communicate with the Eurodac central system in order to make comparisons with information contained in the database. Similarly, Europol will have to designate which authorities are able to handle this issue. If a comparison proves positive, any data linked to the fingerprints investigated will be sent to the relevant law enforcement agencies. The draft also provides a series of guarantees to ensure protection of the personal data of those affected and will safeguard the right to asylum. The processing of personal data is expected to be carried out in compliance with the Council's framework decision on processing personal data in police and legal cooperation when investigating crime. Personal data obtained by a member state or Europol will have to be erased from national files a month later if the data is not used in an ongoing investigation. The proposal clearly forbids the transfer of Eurodac data to third countries or private companies. Nonetheless, member states will be able to transfer this data to third countries applying the Dublin regulation.
So far, although the national authorities in many member states have access to asylum seekers' fingerprints at a national level, it is practically impossible to exchange such information between member states. Despite the fact that many instruments exist at a European level to facilitate the exchange of information between member states, these instruments are not, in the majority of cases, efficient when comparing asylum seekers' fingerprints. Until now, the comparison of asylum seekers' fingerprints in member states has depended on laborious and inefficient instruments. The new measures will help share the costs and make the comparison mechanisms more effective. (B.C./transl.rh)