The EU has proposed a plan to link the National Criminal Databases of all 27 EU member countries into a single all encompassing database that would be accessible by Police and Judicial Agencies in each of the member States. The proposed system is meant to address the current shortfall in information across Criminal Justice systems where a judge in one country would currently in all likelihood, be unaware of a person’s criminal activity in other member States.

Apart from a few changes relating to security and privacy policies, the EU Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx, has broadly given the database his approval. Hustinx’s main concerns centred upon maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of information once it had left its originating State and demanded that certain guarantees relating to this be written into the legal text incorporating the database which is to be known as European Criminal Records Information System (ECRIS).

ECRIS is proposed to operate across the EU’s existing classified data network; Services for Telematics between Administrations (S-TESTA), which was originally developed for the EU by joint consortium of Orange and HP as part of a massive EUR 210 Million project.

An interesting part of the proposed ECRIS network is that it proposes to use automatic translation software to render records easily understandable across all member countries; once again, Peter Hustinx cautioned that every effort must be made to ensure that the use of such be clearly defined and circumscribed in order to assist in the mutual understanding of criminal records whilst at the same time ensuring that the quality of information transmitted would not be diminished.

The EU proposes to have the first stage of the ECRIS system (the interconnection software) operational by early next year.