Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-04-23-Speech-4-527"
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"en.20090423.72.4-527"2
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"Madam President, on behalf of the Commission I would like to welcome this initiative by Parliament to bring the issue of profiling, notably on the basis of ethnicity and race, in counterterrorism, law enforcement, immigration, customs and border control, to the centre of attention at European level.
The Commission is committed – and I am personally committed – to fighting racism and xenophobia to the full extent of the powers conferred by the Treaties, and this includes cases where racism comes from public authorities. The Commission is determined to reinforce our policy to fight racism and xenophobia in the Stockholm context, which should include tackling the issue of ethnic profiling.
Again, on behalf of the Commission, I very much welcome the draft report, and I look forward to its adoption in plenary tomorrow.
The Ludford report represents a very good platform that contributes further to this issue by launching a broad discussion and suggesting how to tackle this problem. I want to underline that already existing data protection legislation ensures a high level of protection of personal data – including sensitive data such as information on ethnicity or race – and applies regardless of the technology used. Therefore, it is obvious that general data protection principles apply to profiling as one of the ways of data processing as well.
The Commission strongly believes that unjustified or unnecessary ethnic profiling is an unfair and prohibited practice, even when this is done for law-enforcement purposes or in connection with immigration, customs and border control, and is contrary to the fundamental values of the European Union.
Under important instruments proposed by the Commission – like the Schengen Border Code, Eurodac, SIS, VIS – the use of unjustified ethnic profiling techniques is not authorised. For example, as regards border controls, the provisions of Article 6 of the Schengen Borders Code require that border guards execute checks with no discrimination against travellers on grounds of racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief.
I would also like to mention the activities of the Fundamental Rights Agency in this field. The Agency is about to present a good practices handbook for combating and preventing ethnic profiling. The Commission supports the inclusion in the 2010 work programme of the agency of joint training with FRONTEX, where the said handbook could be used. The Commission also supports the inclusion in the 2010 work programme of the agency of a project on implementing Article 6 of the Schengen Border Code that aims at collecting data.
Finally, the Commission welcomes the minorities and discrimination survey that was presented yesterday. The sections on law enforcement and border control provide us with further and recent data on experiences of ethnic profiling. The Commission will, of course, carefully study the results of the Minorities and Discrimination Survey, which will be published chapter by chapter through the year. But already now we can conclude that racism and xenophobia are still persistent phenomena in the European Union and that they affect the lives of members of ethnic minorities.
The Commission agrees with the draft report that processing of data for statistical purposes, including ethnicity, race or origin, could be used to identify indirect discrimination or unjustified law enforcement practices. However, this angle has to be properly assessed. Therefore, the Commission is looking into the opportunity to ask the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party to prepare an opinion on the processing of personal data for statistical purposes, including ethnicity, race or origin.
The Commission is also following closely the activities of the Council of Europe on the draft Recommendation on Profiling. The Commission is about to launch a request to the Council for a mandate to be authorised to negotiate this draft recommendation.
As regards the need for a legal framework to define profiling, the Commission believes that the relevant EU legislation on border management and data protection is adequate to protect fundamental rights. Indeed, it requires that any processing activity has to be grounded on a specific, recognised legal basis and respect particularly the principles of necessity, proportionality, purpose limitation and accuracy. It is subject to supervision by independent public authorities. Currently the framework also contains strict rules relating to the processing of sensitive personal data or automated decisions. All these principles also apply to profiling as one of the ways of performing processing of personal data."@en1
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