Time running out for goal of making Europol operational before 1998

Date: 24/07/1997

By Simon Coss

NATIONAL governments will have their work cut out if they are to meet the goal they have set themselves of ensuring the Europol police agency is fully operational by the end of the year.

By far the biggest single challenge faced by the member states is to ensure that the convention setting up the agency is ratified by the EU's 15 national parliaments. So far, only the UK and Denmark have done so, with Spain expected to complete the process before the end of the summer.

But even if the remaining member states follow suit in time, which many critics doubt, there are a host of smaller agreements and protocols to be finalised before the agency can come online.

Next week, a working party of national experts, who have been laying the ground work for the agency for more than two years, will sit down to plan how to proceed.

Apart from the big political challenge of ratification, national officials have identified 16 other points which should be dealt with before the end of Luxembourg's EU presidency.

One area given top priority is drafting rules on how much of the sensitive information handled by Europol will be classified as confidential and how much will be available for wider scrutiny.

Other issues still undecided include such basic questions as the status of the agency's headquarters. It is already clear that Europol will operate out of The Hague, in the Netherlands, but no detailed agreement has yet been drawn up between the Europol management board and the Netherlands government over its legal standing as an international organisation within the host state. This basis must be formally in place before 1 January 1998.

Before Europol can start work, its joint supervisory body also needs to adopt a general set of regulations which outline how the agency will operate. The most important of these for member states will be the rules governing data protection. Many governments are wary of sharing sensitive police information with their EU partners and want cast-iron guarantees that the data will not fall into the wrong hands or be in any way misused.

Other loose ends which need to be tied up include the question of how Europol will work with police forces from non-EU countries.