Police officers will be allowed access to a database holding the fingerprints of asylum-seekers under proposals to be published by the the European Commission on Wednesday (8 July).
The Commission is making the proposal following a request from member states, led by Germany, to allow their law enforcement authorities and Europol access to the Eurodac database to help investigations into terrorism and other serious crimes.
Stigmatisation
The move has been criticised by campaigners who say the Eurodac database was set up to identify asylum-seekers rather than to allow police to search for criminals. “Accessing Eurodac data by law enforcement bodies would increase the risk of stigmatisation of asylum-seekers and raise concerns about discrimination,” said Gilles van Moortel, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Brussels.
Endangering asylum-seekers
The European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) said the move could potentially put asylum-seekers in danger, since Europol would also be allowed access. Europol can exchange data with other EU bodies and third countries. “How would it be ensured that information about people fleeing persecution doesn't reach their persecutors?” said Bjarte Vandvik, the ECRE's secretary-general.
Information exchange
The legal services of the Council of Ministers said, when Eurodac was being set up in 1993, that the information in the database could not be exchanged with third countries. It added it could not be used to investigate fraud “in cases of false declarations or to begin pursuits against the applicants”.
The image of the EU would be damaged by the proposal, according to Kees Groenendijk, the chairman of the Meijers Committee, a group of Dutch experts on refugee law. “This is a real case of mission creep, where they built a database for one purpose and now want to use it for a different purpose,” he said.
The Meijers Committee questions the legal basis of the proposal since the relevant treaty articles on which Eurodac is based do not allow for an extension of its use for security purposes.
‘Bad faith'
Jeanine Hennis-Plasshaert, a Dutch Liberal MEP, said introducing the proposal now was “in bad faith”, since the European Parliament currently does not have co-decision powers over the proposal, but will next year if the Lisbon treaty comes into force. She also questioned why the Commission did not include police access to Eurodac in a proposal published last December on reform of the database.
EU member states instructed the Commission in June 2007 to propose allowing their law enforcement authorities to have access to Eurodac, “in relation to the prevention, detection and investigation of terrorist offences and other serious criminal offences”.
Germany in particular has been pushing for the move. Sweden is opposed, and there are numerous signs of unease among the institutions and the member states.
Eurodac came into operation in 2003 to help determine where asylum-seekers first made an application in the EU.
Under the Dublin Convention, asylum-seekers must be sent back to the EU country where they lodged an initial application.
