The European Digital Rights (EDRi) network has called for MEPs to oppose the plans to create a police facial recognition that would include all the European Union Member States.
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The plans to create such a system are part of the ‘Prüm II’ proposals and aim to legitimise the need for more policing of those moving between the states, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.
Statewatch, which monitors the state and civil liberties in Europe, explains that the plans to enhance law enforcement cooperation across the Member States and to give the EU police officers more modern tools for information exchange were announced by the EU Commission in December 2021.
As part of the plan, the Commission published three proposals, with the first one being a Council Recommendation on operational police cooperation. This proposal aims to codify some rules relating to the cross-border police operation. Statewatch notes that even though this recommendation would be non-binding, it would still set out a series of legal measures that the Member States should implement in order to facilitate cross-border actions.
The other two proposals published by the Commission are a Directive on information exchange between law enforcement authorities as well as a Regulation on automated data exchange for police cooperation, which is also known as ‘Prüm II’.
Statewatch further points out that just like the Directive, the Prüm II proposal seeks to expand the data-sharing between the Member States and Europol. Prüm II would build upon an existing data sharing network, fingerprint, and vehicle registration databases.
Moreover, the network would also require the interconnections of facial image databases, and the Council would also like to make driving licence data accessible, including the facial images stored in relation to these documents.
According to Statewatch, the proposal for which the Commission is offering to pay to set them up is further normalising a technology that has no place in a democratic society.
“The proposal incentivises the creation of facial image databases: although the proposal does not mandate the establishment of a national face database, the European Commission is offering to pay to set them up in member states that do not yet have one, further normalising a technology that has no – or, at best, a very limited – place in a democratic society,” the statement of Statewatch reads.
Taking into account such plans, EDRi has recommended through a position paper that the inclusion of facial image exchange in Prüm II is fully rejected due to the serious risks of fundamental rights violations.
In addition, the same has recommended that all searchers can only be undertaken on the basis of genuinely individual cases and that the large-scale automated exchange of unidentified DNA data gets deleted, among others. ■