EU-lijst met regelingen inzake uitwisseling van gegevens (en)
EUOBSERVER i / BRUSSELS - The EU i and its 27 member states have almost 20 programmes, agencies and agreements governing the exchange of personal, business and telecoms data of EU citizens, a first-ever audit has shown.
The arrangements, sometimes only concerning clusters of member states, are designed to facilitate passport-free travel within the EU, to combat terrorism and crime, and to prevent irregular immigration.
However, the programmes vary in their usefulness and range from the SIS system, which gathers personal data on travellers to Europe's Schengen i borderless zone, to the Advance Passenger Information System, which allows airlines to transmit data on non-EU citizens to border authorities in a bid to combat irregular immigration, and Ecris, the European Criminal Records Information System.
The agreements also vary in the information that is exchanged. The so-called Pruem Decision, originally between seven member states, now sees ten countries exchange DNA information, while the data retention directive, a major source of controversy, allows for the keeping of telecoms data. Co-operation between asset recovery offices sees information on property, vehicles and companies shared.
The data sharing also extends to countries beyond the EU, including agreements with Washington to hand over EU air passenger information and certain banking details.
Some of the initiatives, often proposed by single countries, such as the "Swedish Initiative" on streamlining the sharing of the criminal intelligence, appear to overlap with overarching bodies such as Europol i, a co-ordinating European policy body.
EU home affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom, who on Tuesday published the stocktaking list to make good on a transparency promise to MEPs i, said that overview will help when developing further information exchange policies.
She said she was committed to certain principles of proportionality and relevance.
"Citizens should have the right to know what personal data are kept and exchanged about them. It has to be transparent, coherent and relevant to the actual needs we have," said the commissioner, with the European Parliament regularly raising concern about raising data privacy issues.
Ms Malmstrom also reviewed the EU's counterterrorism strategy, where policies, she admitted, were often made on an "ad hoc" basis.
"The European Union has developed actions based on events, after an attack or an attempted attack causes a huge media tension, a great fear from the population and a pressure on the political leaders to act. But some of these measures are maybe not as effective as they seem in the first place."
She pledged a more "comprehensive and long-term" approach in the future. Specific anti-terrorism measures include the European arrest warrant, an action plan to prevent and respond to incidents involving chemical, biological or nuclear materials and a civil protection mechanism in the case of a terrorist attack.
For the future, Brussels is looking to step up anti-radicalisation measures and has mooted a "security fund", although Ms Malmstrom said it is too early to say how much such a fund would contain and for what it would be used.
Tuesday's information will feed into a broader EU internal security document due to be published in autumn, with the commission noting that while terrorist attacks are on the decrease, terrorists' methods are constantly evolving.