Prüm contract

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Participants in the Prüm Treaty
This article or section needs to be revised: the entries on the card are unlikely to accurately reflect the current contracting parties. By the way, what are "Prüm decisions?"; see. also Disk
Please help to improve it and then remove this mark.
  • Prüm members
  • Participation in Prüm decisions
  • Other EU member states
  • Non-EU member state, but Prüm member

    • The Prüm Treaty is an intergovernmental agreement between currently 13 member states of the EU , which aims to improve cross-border cooperation and in particular the exchange of information between the contracting parties for the purpose of preventing and prosecuting criminal offenses .

    The official name of the agreement is Treaty on deepening cross-border cooperation, in particular to combat terrorism, cross-border crime and illegal migration . In Austria the agreement is also called the Schengen III agreement . It was closed on May 27, 2005 in Prüm , Rhineland-Palatinate . The signatory states are Belgium , Germany , Spain , France , Luxembourg , the Netherlands and Austria ; Bulgaria , Estonia , Finland , Romania , Slovakia and Hungary have so far joined the agreement . The other EU member states can accede to the treaty; however, they are not obliged to do so. The Prüm Treaty is not an EU agreement.

    Data exchange

    The Prüm Treaty provides that police and law enforcement authorities can have direct access to certain databases maintained by the authorities of the other contracting states. The access authorization extends to

    The data and information transfers are carried out by so-called national contact points. In Germany, these are the Federal Criminal Police Office (for DNA analysis data and fingerprints) and the Federal Motor Transport Authority (for motor vehicle data).

    Further content

    The Prüm contract also contains

    • Measures to prevent terrorist offenses (transfer of information, deployment of flight security attendants )
    • Measures to combat illegal migration (use of document advisors, support with returns)
    • Regulations on other forms of cooperation (joint police operations, pursuit , assistance in the event of major events, disasters and serious accidents with transnational effects, cooperation on request) and
    • Privacy Policy.

    The treaty thus contains provisions that are attributable to Community law (including the deployment of flight safety attendants, measures to combat illegal migration) and provisions on intergovernmental cooperation (including cross-border police cooperation).

    First experiences and successes

    The Prüm partners Germany , Austria , Belgium , Luxembourg and Spain are currently the first countries in the world to be able to synchronize their DNA databases. This makes police work easier in that the DNA data is available within minutes. To ensure a high standard of data protection, this retrieval is only carried out with anonymized index files, the so-called hit / no-hit procedure. According to this procedure, the inquiring police station only receives a message as to whether or not the other contracting state also has data for the profile sought . In order to receive further information, for example about the identity of the person, the departments must contact them or initiate a request for legal assistance .

    The results of the DNA comparison of open traces between Germany and Austria : summarized, this comparison has so far led to almost 100 hits with Austrian data sets in Germany and, conversely, to a good 1,500 hits in Austria with German data sets. More than 40 hits have now been made in the field of manslaughter or murder.

    Since February 2008, Germany , Luxembourg and Austria have also been the first countries in the world to exchange fingerprint data in an automated process. The three states grant each other access to their national fingerprint databases. The police authorities receive a notification within a few minutes whether there is any evidence of the entered fingerprint profile in the other country. This retrieval is also carried out using the so-called hit / no-hit procedure.

    privacy

    While the then Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, Peter Schaar, attested the contract in 2006 "overall [...] a high standard of data protection law", which was nevertheless still in need of improvement, there have recently been increasing concerns about data protection law regarding the practice of data exchange based on the Prüm contract loud. In its statement on the planned transfer of the contract into EU law, the EU Parliament called on the EU interior ministers to take greater account of data protection when exchanging police data across borders. In its proposed amendments to the contract, the EU Parliament called for an "adequate level of data protection" to be guaranteed for sensitive personal data transmitted within the framework of the Prüm contract. On the occasion of his activity report for 2007, the top EU data protection officer, Peter Hustinx , criticized the EU interior ministers' lax handling of personal data, particularly when it came to enforcing the Prüm Treaty.

    In order for the treaty to come into force, it must be ratified by the participating states .

    In Germany, the Prüm Treaty was implemented through the law of July 10, 2006, published in the 2006 Federal Law Gazette, Part I, pp. 1458–1460.

    Transfer to the legal framework of the European Union

    This article or section needs revision: The following text is out of date; the development is much further. A new article of the EU's Prümer Decision is in preparation, which will show that all EU Member States and Norway and Iceland, probably also Switzerland, will amend the content of the Prüm Treaty on the basis of a separate Prümer decision of the EU Council, the goes beyond the Prüm contract.
    Please help to improve it , and then remove this flag.

    The justice and interior ministers of the member states of the European Union decided on February 15, 2007 to transpose the regulations of the Prüm Treaty into EU law. At the Council meeting on 12./13. In June 2007, the interior and justice ministers reached political agreement for a decision on the transfer of the essential contractual rules of the Prüm Treaty into the legal framework of the EU.

    In the case of the identical transfer of all contractual provisions, which the contracting states are primarily striving for, several legal acts would have been necessary, which could only have been initiated by the Commission for the contents of the 1st pillar, in the absence of the Member States' right of initiative in this area. For the concrete implementation was therefore approved by the Council on June 23, 2008

    • Adopted a Council resolution on the 3rd pillar regulations,
    • while the treaty will continue to apply between the signatory states and the accession states for the provisions that are to be assigned to the 1st pillar, because it is currently impossible to foresee whether and when the Commission will make use of its (sole) right of initiative.

    In this way, the content relevant to police cooperation ( DNA , fingerprint and central vehicle register data exchange, exchange of information in connection with major events and information exchange on terrorist threats as well as essential parts of the contract regarding the improvement of police cooperation) has been incorporated into the legal framework of EU transferred.

    Due to the special situation between the United Kingdom and Ireland , the controversially discussed transfer of Art. 25 of the Prüm Treaty (Measures in the case of current danger: In urgent cases, officials of one contracting party could have crossed the common border without the prior consent of the other contracting party Space to take provisional measures to avert a current danger to life or limb) are not implemented. This regulation, which was first laid down in the German-Austrian Police and Justice Treaty and "copied" in the Prüm Treaty, has not (yet) found general approval at European level. However, this regulation is fully applicable to all Prüm contracting states.

    criticism

    Critics see in the contract, which is only concluded between individual states, but is then to be incorporated into EU law, a circumvention of the EU Parliament . In addition, the states undertake to pass on data to other states even if the respective actions do not constitute a criminal offense in their own country.

    See also

    literature

    Web links

    Individual evidence

    1. ↑ a b Simplified cross-border cooperation - Prüm Treaty , Federal Ministry of Justice (retrieved from the Internet Archive , version of April 26, 2006)
    2. ↑ PDF at www.bmi.bund.de
    3. ↑ Peter Schaar: Data exchange and data protection in the contract of Prüm. In: Data protection and data security 30 (2006), pp. 691–693.
    4. ↑ EU Parliament: Data protection for Prüm - report at futurezone.orf from April 22, 2008
    5. ↑ Hustinx criticizes the handling of police data - report at futurezone.orf from May 15, 2008
    6. ↑ Ministers agree on EU-wide networking of gene and fingerprint databases - report at www.heise.de on February 15, 2007
    7. ↑ Council of the EU: Communication to the press No. 10267/07 of 12./13. June 2007, p. 11; http://www.consilium.europa.eu/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressData/de/jha/94711.pdf
    8. ↑ Decision 2008/615 / JHA of the Council of 23 June 2008 to deepen cross-border cooperation, in particular to combat terrorism and cross-border crime
    9. ↑ 2007 brings new surveillance - Schengen III now in real operation ARGE Daten