Human rights campaigners claim organisation is not subject to democratic control

Date: 01/10/1998

By Simon Coss

WHILE police forces and governments have generally welcomed the advent of Europol, many human rights campaigners are concerned that the agency poses a serious threat to civil liberties within the Union.

They argue that it is not subject to any real democratic control and point to the fact that it will hold an enormous amount of sensitive personal data on European citizens in its computer files.

“I am convinced that Europol will give us more police powers but less civic rights,” argues Claudia Roth, former president of the European Parliament's Green Group.

Roth is so anxious about the undemocratic nature of Europol that she is planning to launch a legal challenge to the agency at the constitutional court in her native Germany.

“Many judges have told us we have a good case,” she says.

Roth and others are particularly worried that the Europol databases will contain such personal information as an individual's political beliefs and sexual orientation.

They argue that it is difficult to see why the police should require such information, and have expressed concern that it would not be hard for unscrupulous governments to misuse the data.

Europol chief Jürgen Storbeck concedes that his agency will, on occasions, gather such information, but he firmly rejects Roth's complaints.

“Sensitive data of this nature would only be gathered if it were relevant to a particular case. We would not include information on a person's sexual behaviour in a drugs investigation, but in something like the Dutroux case you would need to know this,” he says, referring to the recent Belgian paedophilia scandal.

On the question of a person's political views, Storbeck again argues that such data would only be gathered if it were relevant to the case in question. In investigations into alleged terrorist offences, for example, he says this information would be of vital importance to law enforcement agencies.

But the agency's critics are not convinced. Tony Bunyan, editor of the civil liberties newsletter Statewatch, is particularly concerned that the Europol computers will ultimately be linked up with similar databases serving the Schengen free movement zone and the international police agency Interpol.

If the three systems were fully integrated, he argues, national administrations would have almost instant access to a vast amount of highly sensitive personal data. Bunyan insists that such an encroachment on individual liberty cannot be justified by traditional 'law and order' arguments.

“What people need to realise is once we have Europol, it is here for good,” he says.

There are also fears that it will prove extremely difficult to take the agency to task if people are unhappy with the way it is operating.

National police forces are ultimately answerable to democratically elected parliaments and their officers are subject to the same laws as the people they are investigating. Europol, say critics, is different.

The agency is run by a joint supervisory board made up of national crime prevention officials from the Union's member states.

Its staff, unlike normal police officers, have diplomatic immunity, making it extremely difficult to investigate alleged cases of malpractice.

Once again, Storbeck argues that his critics are worrying unnecessarily. He claims that the joint supervisory board will exercise real control over his agency and that the concerns about diplomatic immunity are overblown.

“Europol staff have less immunity than national diplomats, most parliamentarians or members of the European Parliament. It really is a very limited immunity,” he says.

But whatever arguments the Europol boss puts forward, it is certainly true that the vast majority of EU citizens, as well as a high percentage of its democratically elected politicians, are not really sure what the new police agency is or how it will operate.

Europol was conceived by the Union's justice and home affairs ministers and its founding convention was drawn up using one of the Union's most arcane and secretive lawmaking structures.

Once signed, the convention was then sent off to be ratified by national parliamentarians, who were more or less ordered to rubber-stamp the deal, often without having time to digest its contents fully.

Roth argues that such a procedure would never have been acceptable in Germany if Europol had been a national rather than a European organisation. “They received the texts and just said yes or no. If such an agency were set up in a German region, for example, there would have to be a full parliamentary debate,” she protests.