Transparency and Security: Openness, Biometrics and the Proximity Paradox

Juliet Lodge pointed out that in order to attain the ambitious goal of sustainable freedom, security and justice, the EU envisages numerous programmes, measures and framework decisions to facilitate judicial cooperation. Judicial cooperation is seen as essential to combat international organised crime and terrorism as well as to enable the EU to develop a common effective, fair and just asylum and immigration policy.

The territorial scope of the EU and its member states provide the starting point but justice, freedom and security goals of pillar III are predicated on assumptions about the e-governance advantages of the capitalization of technological innovation.

The European Council’s over-arching goal of facilitating information and data exchange among judicial, security and law enforcement authorities, rests on the explicit assertion of a borderless area of e-judicial data exchange, and the principle of availability.

Lodge argued that this results in a proximity paradox which ultimately challenges the EU to rethink the meaning of sovereignty and relations between citizens, political state and supranational institutions, as increasingly securitised domestic policies escape territorial accountability. ICT are getting outside political and civil control. In this respect Biometric gives an illusion of more security, exacerbating the credibility deficit of Governments.

The unintentional effect of the proximity paradox is that ICTS for justice, freedom and security bring the illusion of the EU being closer than ever before to the citizen (eg ID cards in the hand) but exacerbate fears of Big Brother. The EU’s credibility is not enhanced by that but challenged in a way that is counter-productive to EU goals.

Moreover, transparency and democratic controls are rendered ineffective by creeping operational functionality. These are magnified by the steps already taken based on the assumption that the Draft Constitutional Treaty (DTC) would be in place in 2007. The EU must therefore take action in order to proportionate the struggle for security via the employment of new technology tools.

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