Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-06-06-Speech-3-146"
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"en.20070606.16.3-146"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I do not have much to add after the considerations put forward by Mr Altmaier on behalf of the Council. Concerning the first of the topics being debated, we have from the outset supported the German Presidency’s initiative to transfer most of the third-pillar provisions of the Prüm Treaty into European legislation.
That will facilitate and strengthen cross-border cooperation among police authorities and will certainly facilitate one factor that is absolutely essential if we want to enhance security in the European area, and that is the exchange of information needed to prevent and suppress crime. This exercise is of course also based on the fact that the provisions of the treaty have been shown to be useful where they have already been applied. We have had the opportunity to read an interesting report supplied by the Presidency on how application of the Prüm Treaty between Germany and Austria has produced some positive and surprising results. It has led to the detection of serious criminal acts precisely because certain provisions of this treaty have been used.
There is an important aspect to this: the application of the principle of availability – that is, the exchange of information, which promotes a flow of information – has to be accompanied by adequate protection of personal data. In the event of improper use, there need to be clear rules on prevention that can stop all that happening once and for all. In my view, it is vital that the Council’s decision, already given by the Presidency, is confirmed, and I strongly hope it will be. I am confident that it can be adopted in Luxembourg next week. It contains a clear reference to personal data protection, because unfortunately we do not yet have a framework decision on data protection in this area. This Council decision transferring the articles of the Prüm Treaty into the European
therefore clearly has to deal with data protection, as a precondition for making the exchange of information compatible.
A final aspect of the decision concerns periodical assessment. This will be an important assessment of both operational effectiveness – in other words, how this series of measures will work – and the operation of the safeguard clauses. The assessment will also be useful for Parliament, which will of course receive a copy of it.
On the Visa Information System, I have to congratulate the rapporteur, Baroness Ludford, and the Presidency, and also commend them on their joint efforts to reach a good agreement. A good agreement may in any case be useful to ensure that both the security requirements demanded by many governments and the demands for personal data protection are met. These are non-negotiable rights for the European Union. In our consulates and at our border posts we will have better instruments that will work more effectively and will be made available to honest travellers, while they will also enable the police to detect serious infringements of the law. Data protection rules have been firmly incorporated into the VIS. These rules, including those on fingerprints, were absolutely crucial. Thanks to this agreement the Commission can now develop the technical application that will be needed, because, as you know, our aim is to have the VIS up and running by the spring of 2009 as planned.
There is a specific requirement regarding the operational management of the system, which is that the operational management should be entrusted to a technical body, after an impact assessment has been carried out. This technical body may be proposed operationally within the first two years of operation of the VIS, either because of the economic implications that are yet to be assessed or because of the technical impact assessment that is to be performed. I can give you my personal assessment now: if there is going to be an operational management body, it should not be limited just to the VIS, but there should be a single operational body managing both SIS II and VIS together, so as to make the best use of the resources and its capacity for work.
The third topic is the framework decision on data protection. Here again I must thank Mrs Roure for her report, which gives the Council some encouragement. I put forward the proposal way back in 2005; since then I have appealed to the ministers in Council on several occasions; and today we are getting close to a joint solution. On one aspect, I shall repeat my views, which are well known: I would have liked these data protection rules, which are under the third pillar, to apply to the Member States’ internal legal systems and not just to cross-border exchanges of data and cross-border cooperation. I therefore agree with Mrs Roure's proposal that, no more than three years after the framework decision is adopted, we should re-examine the purpose and scope of these rules and therefore perhaps also the possibility of extending them to the countries’ internal legal systems. Three years is a long enough time.
Mrs Roure mentions an assessment, precisely the one that we are talking about, in order to harmonise the rules on data protection even more. One thing does not rule out the other: both can be done if we use the report which, three years after the system enters into force, should say whether the mechanism is working, where it can be improved and where further harmonisation is possible. We all ought to agree on one thing, which is the need to rule out any use of the data for purposes not specified in advance; in other words, personal data may be used for police and security purposes only if the categories of purposes for which the security authorities may use them have been set out first. That is a key principle, on which we should stand firm.
A debate has yet to be held on the data protection supervisory authorities. Some very careful consideration will certainly be necessary, because the current authorities and the future European authority will have very different attributes, and so more thorough deliberation is probably needed. I have put forward an idea of 15 basic principles to help facilitate agreement. I am very pleased that the President-in-Office of the Council considers the exercise of examining the 15 basic principles that I have proposed to be useful. To conclude, we can make up for lost time, but on this topic we are a long way behind."@en1
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