HOUSE OF LORDS PROPOSES EXTENSION OF DATA PROTECTION PRINCIPLES TO CROSS-BORDER SECURITY AND POLICING
The British House of Lords has issued a report on the protection of personal data, which is critical of the current arrangements for the transfer of police and security information between countries.
The criticisms were made by the House of Lords select committee on the European communities, which undertook a detailed investigation of the EC's draft directive on data protection. Under the so-called Maastricht "pillars" arrangement, "home affairs" will continue to be outside the competence of EC institutions, but will be dealt with on an "intergovernmental" (i.e. secret and unaccountable) basis. This means that the draft directive, which goes much furter than the data protection laws in many EC countries, would not apply to police data - stored, for example, in the Schengen informations System. The committee's report notes:
"We were impressed by the examples supplied [by the current author] of individuals who had suffered real harm from the inaccuracy or misuse of personal data, and noted that all these cases related to matters, such as police and counter-terrorism co-operation, which are outside Community competence. It is in the nature of things that these areas are the ones where real harm is most likely to result to individuals. There is little benefit to the individual in being protected from an unwanted charitable appeal, from unfair loading of his insurance premiums or denial of credit, if he is not also protected from conviction abroad based on suspect police evidence or from mistaken arrest as a supposed terrorist."
The European Commission has proposed that there should be a resolution by EC ministers to bind themselves under international law to apply principles of the directive to those activities that are outside community competence. However, no discussion of such a resolution has taken place, and the committeee expresses "concern" at this. "While we would acccept that any extension of the data protection principles to police and security matters would require wide exemptions from transparency obligations, there are aspects - such as fair obtaining and the need for accuracy - which should apply generally.... we hope that a better balanced directive, with appropriate exceptions and the supervision of material not open to individual access, would be capable of extension by virtue of a resolution of member states to areas outside community competence."
Jolyon Jenkins
Source: Select Committee on the European Communities report on the protection of persoal data; HL Paper 75 (1993), 231 pages.Comment
Although the House of Lords is not, of course, elected, it is part of the UK legislature. Its members tend to be naturally conservative, and the membership of the European Communities committee could not be described as radical. However, by any objective criterion it is distinguished - it includes the country's most prominent labour relations lawyer, Lord Wedderburn, one law lord (i.e.) supreme court judge), Lord Skidelsky (a Conservative historian) and Lord Colville (who oversees the implementation of the Prevention of Terrorism Act). For such a committee to have made such a fortright declaration can be counted as a victory. It is considerably more trenchant than anything produced by the House of Commons, which has barely considered the issue.
Jolyon Jenkins