The Prüm Treaty signed between Germany and Austria is the core of a system which also includes Belgium, Spain, France, Luxembourg and The Netherlands. Italy, Sweden, Greece, Slovenia, Finland, Bulgaria and Romania have all said that they will join the scheme.
The countries are reported to have collaborated on the database sharing initiative separately to the institutions of EU government in order to move more quickly and bypass some of the EU's bureaucracy.
The Council said last week that it wanted to bring the major parts of the Prüm Treaty within EU law. "The Council agreed on the integration into the EU legal framework of the parts of the Prüm Treaty relating to police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters, with the exception of the provision relating to cross-border police intervention in the event of imminent danger. " said a Council statement. "This particular issue will be further examined by the Council."
It is possible for police forces to exchange information currently, but the Treaty makes automatic access to information and databases possible, a move that is likely to anger civil liberties and privacy campaigners.
"Already at this early stage, the automatic information exchange has brought about noticeable operational success," said the Council. "For instance, the German authorities matched DNA profiles of open cases against data held by Austrian authorities and found hits in more then 1,500 cases. In this context, over 700 open traces from Germany could be attributed to persons known to the Austrian criminal prosecution authorities."
"It is true that every hit needs to be examined carefully, and it will not be possible to clear up open cases by an DNA hit alone," it said. "Nevertheless it can be expected that hitherto unsolved cases in Germany and Austria can be closed and the perpetrators be brought to justice. In any case, prosecution authorities are confident that the number of hits will increase constantly as further Prüm countries take part in this process, and that they will thus be able to solve numerous other open cases."
The Treaty makes automatic the sharing of certain kinds of information. Vehicle registration, DNA analysis and fingerprint records are all automatically searchable, as are entire profiles of people.
The Council calls the network a "quantum leap" in the cross border sharing of information, and says that it can be operated under regulation by the EU, but it could raise fears about the privacy of individuals, since records will, under the Treaty, be accessible to many thousands more law enforcement professionals than was previously the case.
The commitment to bring the Treaty into European law was made at a meeting last week of the Justice and Home Affairs meeting of the Council of the European Union, of which Germany holds the rotating presidency.
