Under Article 4 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the Union has a competence shared with its Member States in the area of freedom, security and justice. In order to ensure the control of external borders, the Community has adopted, as part of its asylum policy, a common legal and operational framework, known as the Common European Asylum System (CEAS).
Alongside the legal rules establishing a minimum standard of protection for asylum seekers, the framework establishes rules for determining the State responsible for an asylum application (Regulation N°604/2013, known as "Dublin III"). Under this Regulation, the asylum application is examined by a single Member State if one of the alternative criteria provided for is verified.
In order to ensure an efficient application of the Dublin Regulation, Regulation (EC) N°2725/2000 of 11th December 2000 (amended by Regulation (EU) N°603/2013 of 26 June 2013) creates automated EUROpean DACtylographic system in the EU, also known as EURODAC.
Eurodac is a large-scale database containing information on asylum seekers, applicants for subsidiary protection and illegal immigrants on the territory of the European Union. Recital 5 of the Regulation stresses that "fingerprints are an important element in establishing the exact identity of these persons. It is necessary to create a system for comparing their fingerprint data".
This database contains the fingerprints of persons, the EU country of origin and date of entry into the EU, the gender of the person, or information relating to an application for protection which has already been lodged in another Member State. This basis is therefore intended to avoid asylum shopping and to determine whether the criteria laid down in the Dublin III Regulation are met.
This database is the first common automated system for the identification of fingerprints in the Union and operates on the basis of a common system for exchanging and comparing fingerprints. More specifically, each State records the data of asylum seekers whose files it is processing in its national database and transmits them to the European Central System for recording and comparison with fingerprints already recorded. This Central Unit, operated by eu-LISA (the european agency in charge of managing EU large scale IT systems and supporting member States effort through technology), transmits the result (positive or negative) of the comparison to the Member State according to a "hit/no hit", also known as “match/non-match system”.
In the event of a match, it may choose to return the person to the first country where he or she arrived or where he or she lodged an application for asylum or subsidiary protection. It is up to the authorities of this country to take a decision on the applicant's right of residence. If there is no match, the country that submitted the fingerprints processes the application.
However, in the light of the elements identified by this database, the question of the protection of the data subject arises.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://blog.economie-numerique.net/2020/09/29/eurodac-and-data-protection-1-2-global-introduction/