By Mark Ballard for The
Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
As the Parliament has no authority in the third pillar (the EU's
jurisdiction for police and judicial matters), the amendments it
proposed last night have no official clout. But the European
Council, which calls the shots on this framework, did formally ask
the Parliament for its opinion on the matter, and the German
Presidency has consulted MEPs.
Voting last night to endorse amendments that would ensure firmer
data protection, MEPs have restored hope that data sharing between
European police forces will only be allowed if it is done with
proper regard for civil liberties.
The Germans have made the first concerted effort to revive the
legislation since the Italian and Greek presidencies gave up on it
in 2003 - largely because a few countries, most notably Britain,
didn't like the idea that the common rules would be applied to
national police operations as well.
They broke this deadlock by proposing that the legislation will
only apply to data shared between European police forces and not to
data held by national police forces. However, in three years the
commission will look again to decide whether it ought to be applied
nationally.
It is unlikely that the UK will be any happier about giving up
its sovereignty over police and judicial matters in a few years
time, so the rules are unlikely to be applied nationally. But until
that happens, a fundamental problem the data guardians had with the
legislation still stands, which makes their support of this
compromise look a little curious.
Their problem stemmed from the proposal that the police
shouldn't send data to other forces that don't also have an
adequate level of data protection: if police received data from a
country that didn't have adequate data protection law, they'd never
be sure how reliable it was; if they sent data to a country that
didn't have adequate data protection law, they could never
guarantee the information wouldn't be abused or get into the wrong
hands.
The current restriction on national jurisprudence thus looks
unworkable. But the Parliament has reinstated an amendment that
would prevent the police from sending data to third countries that
don't have adequate data protection.
If that survives the next vote in the council, the national
harmonisation of police data protection rules might be forced by
default. MEPs think this might also have something to say about
Europe's co-operation with controversial US data snooping
programmes like PNR and Swift.
Germany's compromise might also allow the Parliament's other
amendments, which address the strong reservations the European Data
Protection Supervisor expressed about the legislation last month, to
pass the hawkish Council when it meets in June.
© The Register
2007
