Switzerland: Swiss-German exchange of asylum seekers fingerprints
01 November 1995
The Swiss Minister of Justice and the German Minister of the Interior are due to sign an agreement on checking the fingerprints of asylum seekers. Under the agreement 3,000 fingerprint files will be randomly selected from those who sought asylum, between August and October 1993, held in the German Automatic fingerprints identification system (AFIS). AFIS is run by the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA, the Federal Criminal Police Office). The files, together with other personal data, will be given to the Swiss Federal Office for Refugees (BFF). The BFF will check the Swiss AFIS system to see if any of the asylum seekers applied to Switzerland. In 10% of the cases where the application was made to Germany before Switzerland the BFF will also check in its paper files to see if the previous German application had been admitted by the asylum seeker.
According to the agreement the checks will only be used for statistical analysis and the results will have no influence on the decision taken on the applications. Switzerland made a similar agreement with Austria in 1993 and now wants to show that it can be included in the 1990 Dublin Convention procedures.
Despite criticising the automatic fingerprinting of asylum seekers the German Federal Data Protection Commissioner was given the go-ahead by the Commission of the Interior of the Bundestag on 25 October.
In 1992 the Swiss Ministry of Justice and the BFF tried to get agreement with the EU on the creation of a common European AFIS system called "Eurasyl". The EU rejected this in favour of EURODAC a similar system which would back up the Dublin Convention by identifying cases of multiple applications to different EU countries - which is expressly ruled out by the Convention. The Swiss government which wants to link up with EURODAC has to revise the Swiss asylum law in 1996 and this will now include the formalisation of the practice since 1988 of automatically fingerprinting asylum seekers and allow for the regular exchange of data with other countries.
An official of the German Ministry of the Interior said that the Franco-US company Morpho, which has already provided the French and German AFIS systems, is undertaking the feasibility study for the proposed EU's EURODAC asylum seekers fingerprint system. The official also commented that Article 15 of the Dublin Convention limited the exchange of information to individual cases and the mass exchange of information would require the Convention to be amended or a new Convention agreed.
Absprache über den Abgleich von Fingerabdrücken von Asylbewerbern; Taz/WoZ, 3.11.95.