Concerns raised over European security database

PARIS: France has flagged more than 78,000 people as security threats in a database intended to let European police share information on the continent’s most dangerous residents, according to an analysis by the AP.

German parliamentarian Andrej Hunko was the first to raise the alarm on potential misuse of the Schengen Information System (SIS) database in a question to his country’s Interior Ministry about “discreet checks” – secret international checks on people deemed a threat to national security or public safety.

He questioned whether and why different countries seemed to apply very different criteria.

“The increase in alerts cannot be explained by the threat of terrorism alone. Europol reports a fourdigit number of confirmed foreign fighters, yet the increase of SIS alerts in 2017 is several times that,” Hunko said in a statement late last month when he released the Interior Ministry response to his query.

That response included a spread sheet detailing how many discreet checks each European country had flagged up last year – more than 134,000 in all.

“This may mean that families and contacts of these individuals are also being secretly monitored and that the measure is being used on a large scale to combat other criminal activity,” Hunko said.

The number of French police entries “indicates a misuse” of the system, he added.

The Schengen database forms the backbone of European security, allowing authorities to immediately check whether a person is wanted or missing, or a car is stolen, or a firearm is legal, for example.

But a relatively unknown provision in European law allows countries to flag people for the “discreet checks” – allowing law enforcement in one country to notify counterparts elsewhere of a person’s location and activities.

Use of the system has expanded since the IS group attacked Paris and Brussels in 2015 and 2016, from 69,475 in 2015 to 134,662 last year, said euLISA agency and Germany.

But vast disparities in its use by individual countries raise questions about the effectiveness of the tools and the criteria countries are using to enter people into the system.

“There needs to be a proportionality assessment,” said Niovi Vavoula, a legal scholar at Queen Mary University of London.

“If certain member states are introducing alerts en masse to the system, this needs to be flagged as a problem.” — AP

If certain member states are introducing alerts en masse to the system, this needs to be flagged as a problem. Niovi Vavoula