EU directive on airline data passed

AN EU directive obliging EU airlines to provide member states with passenger information on flights between Europe and other countries was passed by 110 votes to 23. The directive is part of the “fight against terrorism” and other serious crime.

Opponents, however, described it as an “invasion of privacy akin to surveillance”. Sinn Féin and members of the technical group of Independents opposed the move, which was backed by Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fáil.

Introducing the EU directive on passenger name record data, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter said the information is already provided by airlines for flights between the EU and the US, Canada and Australia. It “hardly seems credible” that the EU would provide the information to “third countries” but “neglect to avail of the advantages it will afford us in tackling terrorism and serious crime”, he said.

Flights into or out of the EU from or arriving in Ireland would be obliged to send the data to the Irish authority “tasked with their analysis”, said Mr Shatter.

The directive is confined to flights in and out of the EU but Mr Shatter believes the directive should go further and apply to flights within the EU.

He said there were “19 fields of information” including name, address, contact information, travel itineraries and payment methods. He stressed that the sharing of information was essential to ensure EU boundaries “are not a barrier to effective action against terrorists or criminal groups”. Such data had been successfully used in a number of cases and was a “crucial and useful weapon” in dealing with human trafficking, he added.

Fianna Fáil justice spokesman Dara Calleary, whose party supported the proposal, said “an extension of a system to cover all flights within the EU is essential in order to assure the overall effectiveness. PNR data is already used on a daily basis by airlines and is stored in the reservation systems of airline carriers for commercial reasons.”

It should be used “to provide greater protection to citizens of Europe”. He said such data “manually obtained, has been used for almost 60 years by customs and law enforcement authorities throughout the world”.

But Sinn Féin’s Jonathan O’Brien said the directive “would mean passengers would be subjected to extensive tracking, tracing and screening procedures. Proponents of the proposal argue the ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ principle but this is a simplified outlook which should not be used as a reason to force through measures that are unnecessarily intrusive into the data and privacy rights of citizens.”