Warning over police access to Eurodac database

A group of legal experts has warned Franco Frattini, the European commissioner for justice, freedom and security, against allowing police access to a database of fingerprints from asylum-seekers.

Frattini will next April suggest changing the regulation governing the database, known as Eurodac, to allow police access following requests from EU interior ministers.

But the experts, in a letter dated 18 September, say that this would "lead to stigmatisation and discrimination of this group of individuals" and "would change the database into a criminal law investigation tool which is contrary to the purpose of this system".

When the database was first proposed in 2000, the Council of Ministers’ legal service stated that Eurodac should not be used to launch criminal investigations against asylum-seekers, the letter by the Standing Committee of Experts on International Immigration, Refugee and Criminal Law, a non-governmental organisation based in the Netherlands, points out. "The proposal to extend the use of Eurodac is clearly in breach of the adopted rules with regard to the limited purposes of this database," it adds.

A spokesman for Frattini said that the commissioner would "study the letter carefully" before responding.

MEPs have also expressed concern at the prospect of allowing police access to Eurodac, while a report by the UK’s House of Lords "expressed doubts about the legality of police access to Eurodac under existing EU law".

The idea of allowing police access to Eurodac was first mentioned at a meeting of interior ministers of the EU’s six largest states at Heiligendamm in Germany in March last year. Germany pushed for the idea, during its six-month EU presidency in the first half of this year, and as a result interior ministers at their meeting in June requested a Commission proposal to this effect.

Eurodac went into operation in 2003 and was established in the wake of the Dublin Convention, which determines which EU state should handle an asylum application. The database can give information on where an asylum-seeker first made an application.

A group of legal experts has warned Franco Frattini, the European commissioner for justice, freedom and security, against allowing police access to a database of fingerprints from asylum-seekers.