By Anthony Fletcher - 5th November 2007
ALDE MEP Sarah Ludford has questioned the efficacy of commission-backed measures designed to fight terrorism.
The Liberal Democrat European justice spokesperson said that the proposed plan, due to be approved Tuesday, “must be subjected to a rigorous test of necessity”.
The package includes a European version of the EU-US passenger name record agreement, and Liberals in parliament have expressed deep concern over data privacy.
“It is not self-evident that piling on yet more layers of surveillance, profiling and criminalisation of conduct will pass that hurdle,” said Ludford.
“Why not first tackle major existing failures like hoarding of essential information and non-implementation by some member states of the 2002 terrorism legislation on which the commission has been unable to produce any evaluation report since 2004?”
Parliament rapporteur on PNR issues Sophie In't Veld also gave a strong warning to the commission that it must not ignore civil liberties in its pursuit of terrorists.
"We should not be compounding the mistakes of the July PNR agreement with the US by introducing our own - at least until there is serious and irrefutable proof that such mass exchange of personal data is resulting in the arrest of terrorists," she said.
"I remain adamant that PNR data should not be used as an indiscriminate form of data profiling.
"But evidence points to the contrary as the US authorities are still able to "pull" all sorts of information from EU carriers' databases without prior permission and without adequate safeguards on the end users or length of data retention."
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