EU considers exchanging sex offender records

The EU is to consider urgent new measures to give member countries access to each other’s criminal records of paedophiles and other sex offenders, officials said today.

The action comes following the case of Michel Fourniret, who is in being held in Belgium after confessing to nine murders, mostly of girls and young women.

Justice and home affairs ministers from the 25 EU nations are due to discuss the plans on Monday.

“The machinery in place for information exchange about criminal records of persons involved in cross-border offences is inadequate,” said Pietro Petrucci, a spokesman at the European Commission.

“There are serious gaps and these need to be replaced with something more effective,” he added.

Fourniret, aged 62, moved to Belgium in the late 1980s after serving time in France for child sex offences.

He was given a job in a school lunch room by Belgian authorities who were unaware of his criminal record.

Although none of his suspected crimes are directly linked to his work at the school, the Belgian government is leading calls for new European measures to allow police to share information.

Petrucci said technical and legal differences among the 25 EU nations made the creation of an EU-wide criminal data base unrealistic in the short term, but he said the union could move quickly to set up a computerised network of information exchange on serious crimes including paedophilia and other sex offences.

EU leaders agreed this year to set up such an exchange on terrorist related crimes.

Petrucci said the European Commission could present a legislative bill by October to widen the information exchange, if it gets backing from the ministers on Monday.