Peter Hustinx, the European Data Protection Supervison (EDPS),
has made his warnings in relation to the Data Protection Framework
Decision (DPFD), a proposed basis for police data sharing across
Europe.
In 2005 the European Union began investigating the creation of
the DPFD, which would control the way in which police forces use
citizens' data, including during cross-border data transfers. The
Council of Ministers published the Framework Decision in 2005, and
negotiations have been ongoing ever since.
Hustinx has three times raised serious objections to the way
negotiations over the DPFD have progressed. He also previously
called for a proportionality of response to data, so that a
suspect's data would be treated differently to that of a witness or
a convicted person.
He has now raised another serious concern, which is that the
negotiations have produced a compromise by which protection will
only be extended to data coming from another country.
"When the DPFD was first proposed, it was supposed to cover all
aspects of policing and the judiciary," said Hustinx. "The recent
agreement by the Council severely limits the scope of the text, and
therefore also limits the level of protection the European citizen
can expect from the resulting agreement."
"The DPFD cannot lessen the level of protection offered,
otherwise this will make it more difficult for police services to
meet their international obligations," he said.
Hustinx is echoing concerns he raised in his very first response
to the plans in 2005. Back then he called for a requirement that
data protection rules cover all police and judicial data, not just
that exchanged between member states. Then, he said that the
creation of two classes of data – those from a country and those
from a foreign EU nation – undermined the likelihood of people
asserting their data protection rights.
The Council of Ministers decided this week that the protection
will only apply to data exchanged across borders.
"After more than a year and a half of intense negotiations on
this proposal, the Presidency proposed a narrow scope of the
Framework Decision, which means that the text will apply to the
cross-border exchange of personal data only," said minutes of the
Council meeting. "This understanding will also imply an evaluation
by the Commission of the data protection system, including the
limitation of the scope, three years after the Framework Decision
will apply to Member States."
The EDPS said that the move damaged the proposed measure. "A
drive for agreement should not dilute the level of protection for
personal data provided in police and judicial cooperation in
criminal matters," said a statement from the EDPS office.
The move has caused some privacy experts to wonder how much
attention the institutions of the EU pay to data protection and to
Hustinx.
"This is the third time the EDPS has blown into the wind. He
repeatedly raises serious data protection issues which do not seem
to be taken on board," said Dr Chris Pounder, a privacy expert at
Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM.
"The European Commission merged data protection and security so
that privacy principles would be balanced with security
objectives," said Pounder. "When this new outcry is combined with
what the EDPS has said previously in relation to [controversial
banking body[ SWIFT and passenger name records, one wonders whether
the Commission now sees privacy principles as being subservient to
security objectives."
