The Prüm Treaty signed between Germany and
Austria is the core of a system which also includes Belgium, Spain,
France, Luxembourg and The Netherlands. Italy, Sweden, Greece,
Slovenia, Finland, Bulgaria and Romania have all said that they
will join the scheme.
The countries are reported to have
collaborated on the database sharing initiative separately to the
institutions of EU government in order to move more quickly and
bypass some of the EU's bureaucracy.
The Council said last week that it wanted to
bring the major parts of the Prüm Treaty within EU law. "The
Council agreed on the integration into the EU legal framework of
the parts of the Prüm Treaty relating to police and judicial
cooperation in criminal matters, with the exception of the
provision relating to cross-border police intervention in the event
of imminent danger. " said a Council statement. "This particular
issue will be further examined by the Council."
It is possible for police forces to exchange
information currently, but the Treaty makes automatic access to
information and databases possible, a move that is likely to anger
civil liberties and privacy campaigners.
"Already at this early stage, the automatic
information exchange has brought about noticeable operational
success," said the Council. "For instance, the German authorities
matched DNA profiles of open cases against data held by Austrian
authorities and found hits in more then 1,500 cases. In this
context, over 700 open traces from Germany could be attributed to
persons known to the Austrian criminal prosecution
authorities."
"It is true that every hit needs to be
examined carefully, and it will not be possible to clear up open
cases by an DNA hit alone," it said. "Nevertheless it can be
expected that hitherto unsolved cases in Germany and Austria can be
closed and the perpetrators be brought to justice. In any case,
prosecution authorities are confident that the number of hits will
increase constantly as further Prüm countries take part in this
process, and that they will thus be able to solve numerous other
open cases."
The Treaty makes automatic the sharing of
certain kinds of information. Vehicle registration, DNA analysis
and fingerprint records are all automatically searchable, as are
entire profiles of people.
The Council calls the network a "quantum leap"
in the cross border sharing of information, and says that it can be
operated under regulation by the EU, but it could raise fears about
the privacy of individuals, since records will, under the Treaty,
be accessible to many thousands more law enforcement professionals
than was previously the case.
The commitment to bring the Treaty into
European law was made at a meeting last week of the Justice and
Home Affairs meeting of the Council of the European Union, of which
Germany holds the rotating presidency.
