Schengen Agreement: ICT

(asked on 15th October 2014) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the usual practice of UK authorities will be with regard to checking whether an object covered by Article 38 of Council Decision 2007/533/JHA is associated with an alert under that article, if the UK were to connect to the Schengen Information System II.


Answered by
Karen Bradley Portrait
Karen Bradley
This question was answered on 24th October 2014

Council Decision 2007/533/JHA is legislative basis for governing the second generation of the Schengen Information System (SIS II) for the purposes of police and judicial co-operation in criminal matters.

The communication of relevant data to the issuing State under Article 37(3) will take place on the basis of centralised electronic forms. In the UK that will be coordinated by the National Crime Agency and will have a minimal impact on operational resources.

The Government makes no distinction between discreet checks and specific checks under Article 37(4) because, under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, UK authorities can only treat these alerts as discreet. However, if there has been a domestic offence committed, or the person is of interest to UK national security agencies, then the person would be dealt with under national legislation.

Article 38 provides that Member States shall enter data onto SISII on objects sought for seizure or use as evidence in criminal proceedings. For the UK, SISII will be integrated into the Police National Computer (PNC) infrastructure and will allow officers easy access to create and check lost and stolen objects subject to SISII alerts. Article 39 provides that when a SISII search identifies a "hit" i.e. the database shows that the object has been located, the relevant authority should be contacted in order to agree on next steps.
This will be coordinated by the NCA.

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