20 april 2016

The European Parliament ratified on Thursday 14 April a new regulation about the use of the passenger name record data that will oblige airline companies to facilitate the information about passengers arriving to the EU coming from third countries and vice-versa to the national authorities. The regulation was adopted with 461 votes in favour, 179 against, and 9 abstentions.

The objective of this measure is to toughen the fight against terrorism and drug dealing through the control of suspicious behaviour patterns. ‘It is not a magic formula, but countries with national register systems of data have proven that it is a highly effective resource’, said Timothy Kirkhope, the member of the European Parliament responsible of the parliamentary processing of the proposal. In order to complete the implementation of this regulation, the Member States will have to create a Passengers Information Unit in charge of:

• Processing the airlines collected data;
• Storing them for five years; After the first six months, contact data won’t appear;
• Transferring the information to the competent authorities;
• Interchanging the data with the information units of other EU countries and with Europol.

The text points out that the storage of data will be done ‘case by case’ and only with ‘prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of crimes of terrorism and serious offences contemplated’ purposes.

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Which crimes?

• Belonging to a criminal organisation;
• Human trafficking;
• Sexual exploitation of children and child pornography;
• Drug dealing;
• Arms trafficking;
• Corruption;
• Fraud;
• Money Laundering;
• Homicide, rape and kidnapping.

The regulation will be effective for extra-community flights, even countries will be able to extend it to intra-community flights previous notification to the European Commission.

About the possible dilemmas generated by this directive, Kirkhope pointed out that ‘are proportional in relation to the risks we are facing’. The regulation include the following safeguards regarding data protection:

• The Passengers Information Unit will have a person in charge of controlling the PNR data management and of applying the appropriate guarantees;
• After six months, the access to the information will be limited;
• Information Units will issue reports about the data treatment;
• Data treatment will be forbidden if the following information is revealed: racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, membership of a trade-union, health, sexual life or sexual orientation of a person.

Steps to follow

Once this directive has the approval of the European Parliament, it will have to be adopted by the Council and published at the Official Journal of the EU. Then, the Member States will have two years to enforce the regulation.