Eurodac is the European Union’s fingerprint database for asylum applicants and people apprehended at irregular border crossings. The UK helped to design it. I was part of that process. Together with the Schengen Information System, SIS II, which holds law-enforcement and border alerts, these are two of the most significant EU databases that British authorities used routinely and have lost access to since we left the European Union. The practical cost of those gaps is greater than is generally understood.
I write as someone who served as a Home Office minister responsible for immigration and border controls under John Major, and who later worked on this and other security legislation as the Conservative MEP and Justice and Home Affairs spokesperson.
This is not an argument about relitigating past debates or the UK’s wider relationship with the European Union. It is about a single, targeted measure that would strengthen our security and add to the tools available for tackling the small boats.
When an asylum seeker arrives in an EU country, their fingerprints are taken and stored in a central database. When a claim is made elsewhere, those prints are checked. If there is a match, the receiving authorities know at once that the person has claimed asylum somewhere already or has been refused. That is what stops an applicant moving on to the next country, submitting a fresh claim and hoping that no one notices. It streamlines the system, prevents duplicate claims and eases the administrative pressure on each member state, because caseworkers are not repeating assessments for the same applicant.
It is worth separating Eurodac from the broader rules around it. The Dublin Regulations, which I helped to draft, tried to determine which European country was responsible for processing a given asylum claim, but in its several guises has had real acceptability problems and is now being reformed through the EU’s new Migration and Asylum Pact, which begins to take effect this year. These reforms are overdue and there will undoubtedly continue to be disagreement about the detail. However, none of that should obscure the more basic point: the database itself is effective, and the UK should be making the case for renewed access regardless how the wider Pact evolves.
In practice, since we left the EU, when someone whose claim has been refused elsewhere in Europe arrives in the United Kingdom, we take the claim and assess it from scratch. We have no automatic means of knowing that the same person was assessed and rejected in another country months or years before, and they are not required to volunteer the information. The refusal in Sweden, or Germany, or France, might as well never have happened. For anyone watching the small boats arriving on the Kent coast, the relevance is plain enough.
SIS II is a different system, but the loss has been every bit as serious, if not more so. It holds alerts on wanted and missing persons, on stolen vehicles, identity documents and firearms, and on items of interest at borders. In 2019, the last full year before we left Europe, UK police and border officers consulted it more than 571 million times, at airports, ports, roadside checks and on incident logs. It was one of the most heavily used law-enforcement tools we had, and the House of Lords described its loss as “a serious decline in our operational capacity”. Key to its usefulness was its availability in real-time avoiding delays in putting useful information to work. Restoring access to SIS II belongs in the same conversation as Eurodac, and for similar reasons.
I am glad to say that the last Conservative government recognised all of this and sought continued access during the negotiations that followed our departure from the EU. Those talks failed. The EU was unwilling, at that point, to carve out data-sharing arrangements on asylum or on law enforcement within the wider settlement as it was regarded as a benefit not available to “Third Countries” as we had become. That was a missed opportunity, and one that harmed the security of the EU as well as ourselves.
The case for the EU showing fresh flexibility now rests on that strong mutual interest. Eurodac and SIS II exist because European countries recognised that irregular movement, multiple asylum claims and serious cross-border crime can only be addressed collectively. That logic does not stop at the English Channel. An asylum seeker rejected in France who then makes a claim in the UK is as much a problem for the integrity of the European system as for ours; so is a wanted offender, or a missing person, who crosses an internal border. Real-time data exchange between the UK and EU member states would serve collective security on both sides.
The argument has also become more pressing with time. The EU has updated Eurodac. The recast system goes considerably further than before. It will hold facial images alongside fingerprints, extend biometric registration and broaden its scope from asylum seekers to irregular migrants more generally. The database is becoming more comprehensive and more useful to the countries that use it.
Effective border management has always depended on cooperation. Leaving the European Union has not changed that. As cross-border crime and irregular migration continue to grow, the need has only grown with it.
The government should pursue a data-sharing arrangement that restores meaningful access to Eurodac and SIS II together. The EU must agree. The integrity of our asylum system, the effectiveness of UK and European policing and the credibility of our policy on the small boats depend on access to the information that already exists.
This article was written by Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate, who served as a Home Office minister under John Major and as the Conservative Party’s Justice and Home Affairs spokesperson in the European Parliament. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Prosper UK.