EU members are ‘reluctant to share crime data’, states report

By David Cronin

Date: 10/06/04

EU MEMBER states have accorded little priority to sharing sensitive data on such criminal activities as drug trafficking and counterfeiting of goods, according to a new report.

Set up in March 2003, the Customs Information System (CIS) was designed as a central EU database.

Yet a paper prepared for the customs cooperation working party at the Council of Ministers complains it has a "low usage" so far and that "management in the member states are not really concerned" about this.

"Member states have been reluctant to input data into the central database," the document adds. In addition, "they do not provide adequate justification for effectively suspending the use of the system or not using it at all".

The CIS, which is administered by the European Commission's anti-fraud office (OLAF), was envisaged as a means of boosting the coordination between different customs services. It can store information on breaches of EU customs and agriculture legislation - such as smuggling of cigarettes and alcohol or the unauthorized transport of live animals - as well as customs legislation in the 'intergovernmental' domain. Trafficking in illegal drugs is among the activities covered by the latter category.

In January, the Council's working party decided to devise a strategy for maximizing the use of the system. The team of officials working on that strategy has now submitted its interim analysis to Ireland's EU presidency.

It finds that there is confusion over what information should be stored in CIS and what should be entered into the older Anti-Fraud Information System, which is supposed to handle data of a less sensitive nature.

The team also stated that member states are entering the same information they are supposed to place in CIS into national systems. "As there is no common interface between the systems for inputing or querying data, it is time-consuming for customs officers to have to 'double-key' the same data in a European database," the paper adds.

While there is "a common view" that CIS is a complex system, national authorities have been tardy in arranging for training in its usage for organizational or budgetary reasons. "However, the use of CIS should be a priority for the member states in the fight against fraud," says the paper. "Policy must be converted into action."

Belgium is singled out for particular criticism as it is the only one of the 15 'old' EU countries not yet to have ratified the convention applying to the CIS.

According to a report prepared for the Council of Europe's Working Party on Customs Co-operation, Member States have not made full use of the Customs Information System (CIS) which was designed as a central European Union database on criminal activities such as drug trafficking and counterfeiting of goods. The CIS was intended to be a means of improving co-ordination between different customs services.

http://ec.europa.eu/comm/justice_home/fsj/customs/informsystem/printer/fsj_customs_informsystem_en.htm http://ec.europa.eu/comm/justice_home/fsj/customs/informsystem/printer/fsj_customs_informsystem_en.htm

---