The UK joins the Schengen Information System
Bringing the Panopticon Home: the UK joins the Schengen Information System
Steve Peers
Over two hundred years ago, British
philosopher Jeremy Bentham devised the concept of the ‘Panopticon’: a prison designed
so that a jailer could in principle watch any prisoner at any time. His theory
was that the mere possibility of constant surveillance would induce good
behaviour in prison inmates. In recent years, his idea for a panopticon has become
a form of shorthand for describing developments of mass surveillance and social
control.
The EU’s forays in this area
began with the creation of the Schengen Information System (SIS) in the 1990s. The
SIS is a well-known EU-wide database containing enormous amounts of information
used by policing, immigration and criminal law authorities.
Until now, the UK has not had any
access to the SIS. But this week, the EU Council finally approved the UK’s participation
in the System, thereby linking the EU’s most iconic database with the
intellectual home of the panopticon theory. What are the specific consequences
and broader context of this decision?
Background
The main purpose of the Schengen
system is to abolish internal border checks between EU Member States, as well
as some associated non-EU States. At the
moment, the full Schengen rules apply to all EU Member States except the UK,
Ireland, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia. Those rules also apply to four
associates: Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
All of the Member States are
obliged ultimately to become part of the Schengen system, except for the UK and
Ireland. Those two Member States negotiated an exemption in the form of a
special Protocol at the time when the Schengen rules (which originated in the Schengen Convention, ie a treaty drawn up outside the EU legal order) were
integrated into the EU legal system, as part of the Treaty of Amsterdam (in
force 1999).
The UK and Ireland are not
entirely excluded from the Schengen system. In fact, they negotiated the option
to apply to join only some of the Schengen rules if they wished. Their
application has to be approved by the Council, acting unanimously. The UK and
Ireland essentially chose to opt in to the Schengen rules concerning policing
and criminal law, including the SIS, but not the rules concerning the abolition
of internal border controls and the harmonisation of rules on external borders
and short-term visas.
The UK’s application to this end was approved in 2000 (see Decision here), and Ireland’s was approved in 2002 (see Decision here). But in order to apply each Decision in practice, a separate subsequent Council decision was necessary, because the Schengen system cannot be extended before extensive checks to see whether the new participant is capable of applying the rules in practice. On that basis, most of the Schengen rules which apply to the UK have applied from the start of 2005 (see Decision, after later amendments, here). The exception is the rules on the SIS, which the UK was not then ready to apply. After spending considerable sums trying to link to the SIS, the UK gave up trying to do so, on the basis that the EU was anyway planning to replace the SIS with a second-generation system (SIS II). There’s a lot of further background detail in the House of Lords report on the UK’s intention to join the SIS (see here), on which I was a special advisor. (Note that Ireland does not apply any of the Schengen rules in practice yet).
Continue reading on Steve's own page please: http://eulawanalysis.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/bringing-panopticon-home-uk-joins.html
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