Asylum seekers face EU fingerprint changes

New rules that will give EU law enforcement authorities the right to access the Eurodac database to check asylum seekers’ fingerprints took a step forward this week. MEPs voted to allow the access, but only if greater protection is given to personal data.

Eurodac stores the fingerprints of asylum seekers aged over 14. Since 2003 it has been used to help determine which EU member state is responsible, under the Dublin regulation, for dealing with asylum applications made to EU or Dublin Associated States, i.e. Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

To address data protection concerns and help combat terrorism and serious crime, the European Commission proposed in May 2012 to update Eurodac rules to allow national law enforcement authorities such as the police and Europol, to compare fingerprints held in their own databases with those contained in Eurodac.

The matter came before the Civil Liberties Committee this week, when members voted in favour of giving police the access to Eurodac, but first inserted stricter safeguards than originally proposed to protect asylum seekers' data and ensure that they know that these data could be used not only for identification, but also for law enforcement purposes.

The committee's amendments stipulate that comparing fingerprints for law enforcement purposes would be possible only to prevent, detect or investigate specific cases of terrorist offences or other serious criminal offences where "there is an overriding public security concern which makes proportionate the querying of the database".