Guardian News and Media/London
A Commons vote is to be held before Christmas on whether Britain should end a two-year delay and opt into a European fast-track scheme to share police DNA and fingerprint databases, the home secretary will announce this week.
The move is expected to revive protests from Conservative Eurosceptic MPs whose opposition has successfully blocked Britain’s participation in the European police data-sharing scheme since July 2013.
But Theresa May hopes the terrorist attacks in Paris will underline the case for Britain’s participation, which will give UK detectives accelerated access to more than 5mn fingerprints, DNA profiles and car registration records held across Europe.
The Prum databases, named after the treaty signed in the German town in 2005, were part of the package of 130 EU crime and justice pre-Lisbon treaty measures for which Britain exercised its opt-out in 2013 and were not among the 35 measures ministers decided to opt back into in 2014.
May told MPs in July 2014 that she had “successfully resisted” joining the Prum scheme as Britain neither had the time or money to implement the scheme by the deadline of December 2014.
She said British detectives investigating murder or rape cases were already able to access DNA and fingerprint databases held by other European police forces.
However, she pointed out that since 30% of suspects arrested in London were foreign nationals, there was a clear operational necessity to use the scheme and promised to carry out a pilot scheme and bring back to parliament a detailed business case before any further vote.
The results of the pilot held earlier this year have now been published and May will tomorrow announce that MPs are to vote before Christmas on whether to opt-in to the Prum scheme.
Ministers estimate it will cost £13mn for Britain to participate in the scheme and open up Britain’s DNA database, which holds profiles of more than 3mn convicted criminals, to other European police forces. It would be fully connected by 2020.
The pilot, in which DNA samples from the crime scenes of 2,513 unsolved British murders, rapes and burglaries were automatically checked against European police databases in France, Germany and the Netherlands, revealed 73 potential suspects.
The scheme also established that existing requests by the British police for DNA checks from other European forces using established channels take an average of 143 days for the results to come back. These channels include making a request to the National Crime Agency, which then passes it on to Interpol before it is referred to a national police force.
The Prum system promises a mandatory response time of 10 seconds for an automated number plate check, 15 minutes for a DNA check, and 24 hours for a fingerprint match. If a positive match is obtained, the requesting force has to make a specific request before any individual details of a suspect are passed on.
The two-year delay in Britain’s participation has been accompanied by concerns from the campaign group GeneWatch and others that the different DNA profiling systems in use within the EU risk throwing up large numbers of false DNA matches.
This was regarded as particularly difficult when matching crime scene profiles held by the German police and individual DNA profiles on Britain’s database. It is thought, however, that legislation removing from the British database more than 1mn profiles of innocent people who had been arrested but not convicted of any crime has gone a long way to solving the problem.
Theresa May hopes the terrorist attacks in Paris will underline the case for Britain’s participation
