Keywords

Introduction

In this chapter, we introduce the concept of ‘biobordering’. Taking the nationally grown crime control regimes into account, we argue that the proposed concept of bioborders is useful in capturing how the territorial foundations of national state autonomy are partially reclaimed (what we call rebordering) and at the same time partially purposefully suspended (what we call debordering). The concept of biobordering is useful in trying to understand how modes of biobordering entangle with large-scale IT database infrastructures for the exchange of biometric data in the context of crime control. We do so, in particular, by looking into attempts to track the mobility of certain ‘risky’ individuals across state borders and identify people related to crimes, including victims, and missing persons.

In this book, the concept of biobordering aims to address the following research question: who or what is acting when transnational large-scale IT database infrastructures facilitate the exchange of biometric data for the purposes of crime control and tracking of mobile ‘risky’ people? In order to try to provide some answers, we use the concept of biobordering to understand actions and interactions that go beyond state-as-actor-centred perspectives. Therefore, we consider multiple actors and actions, including those that constitute or contest notions of the autonomy and territorial borders of nation-states. We take into account the actions and practices that confirm, but also suspend or contest, nation-states’ legal and territorial borders. In summary, in this book we look in depth into the notion of nation-state-embedded agency in the context of the establishment and operation of such transnational infrastructures and understand such agency as activities that contribute to the performance of the actions of transnational infrastructures which remain shaped by nation-state logics.

Taking inspiration from research in technology and organizations, we mobilize the notion of ‘distributed agency’ (Rammert, 2008, pp. 78–83), which relates to the strong interdependence between the material and the social given the complexity and interaction between human and non-human elements. On the one hand, we assume that there are modes of ordering through ‘distributed agency’ across several human actors, including biometric specialists, criminal justice system personnel, data protection authorities and oversight bodies. On the other hand, we also take into account advanced technologies, such as biometric technologies and IT database systems, which perform action ‘closely knit together’ through their interrelations with human actors in a heterogeneous network of activities (Rammert, 2008, p. 82). By looking into ‘distributed agency’ across actors and technologies involved in the transnational infrastructures at stake, our aim is to understand how borders are enacted and reinforced through biometric technologies and biological data exchange in unexpected ways.

In this chapter, we begin by reviewing recent insights from border studies to clarify why we are proposing to use the concept of ‘biobordering’. We continue by outlining biobordering’s components, including debordering and rebordering dynamics, that make bioborders more or less permeable for expansive biometric data exchange. Afterwards, we explore the different logics of the debordering dynamics at work at the EU level, highlighting the legal, scientific, technical, political and ethical dimensions of data exchange across borders that are configured to achieve technological integration across Member States. In addition, we outline the notion of biobordering and its meaning in the context of the transnational exchange of DNA data regulated by the Prüm system, portraying how political and regulatory ambitions have translated into debordering practices of the EU institutions.

Biobordering: Who Borders What and How?

Recent insights from border studies have turned to approaches that understand borders not as given, but as continuously ‘being made’ and as involving ‘b/ordering practices’ (van Houtum, Kramsch, & Zierhofer, 2005; Kolossov & Scott, 2013). We situate our own approach in line with approaches that understand borders as emerging through socio-political as well as techno-scientific processes. Broeders and Dijstelbloem (2016) have stated that, in the context of new technologies of surveillance and the digitization of information about border policies, the nature of the border has changed radically (Broeders & Dijstelbloem, 2016). Now the border is ‘everywhere’ (Lyon, 2005). It has changed into a ‘border security continuum’ (Vaughan-Williams, 2010). Trends towards the virtualization and digitization of measures for transnational police collaboration in the context of migration and crime control have shifted formal border policy agendas and actual polities. Under the labels of ‘smart borders’ (Lehtonen & Aalto, 2017; Leese, 2016), ‘iborders’ (Pötzsch, 2015) and ‘virtual borders’ (Johnson et al., 2011), these trends have been addressed in policy discourse and extensively reflected in border studies (Amoore, 2006).

Louise Amoore coined the term biometric borders to describe how biometrics shape borders in society. By studying ‘dataveillance’ in the war on terror, Amoore (2006, p. 339) found that biometric techniques involve processes of objectivization, that is, practices that divide and break up a subject into calculable risk factors that transform the subject into an object. Such objectivization results in new technologies of surveillance identifying ‘what effectively become suspect populations or “risky groups”’ (Amoore, 2006, p. 339). Performing the very idea of the biometric border is then described as an exercise of biopower (Amoore, 2006, pp. 337–339), by which the bodies of migrants and travellers themselves turn into sites of multiple encoded social, legal, gendered and racialized boundaries. In a collectively published contribution, Paasi in a subsection of a joint article (Johnson et al., 2011) has argued, with reference to Amoore, that technical landscapes of control and surveillance monitored by increasingly technical devices and biometrics may also contribute to the bordering in a society. By expanding Amoore’s concept of ‘bordering in society’, Paasi specifies how borders can also be constitutive of social, cultural and political distinctions between social groups in relation to technologies. In this sense, Paasi argues that new technologies associated with border control for the purposes of preventing terrorism or illegal immigration may indeed exist ‘everywhere’ (Johnson et al., 2011).

Very few studies (Tsianos & Kusters, 2016; Tazzioli, 2019) have addressed what such biometric borders mean for the people affected. An exception is Scheel’s work (2013), which explores how migrants contribute to what he calls ‘processes of biometric rebordering’ when biometrics impact the ways in which migrants appropriate their mobility to counter biometric border regimes. Scheel emphasizes how this in return requires us to rethink moments of autonomy in migration. The studies that do address targeted populations focus on migration control, but rarely on crime control. An exception is Machado and Prainsack’s (2012) study on prisoners and their perceptions of DNA technologies, which primarily focuses on situated understandings of targeted populations in Austria and Portugal rather than on the impact of borders. Biometrics for identification applied not specifically and narrowly for the purpose of migration and crime control but with an effect of constructing suspicion and partially criminalization of targeted populations are at stake in the context of India’s Aadhaar programme. With the world’s largest national biometric identification database which was initiated in 2009 the Government of India aimed to confront two problems. First, comprehensive biometric identification was thought as a solution to the lack of identification papers amongst the rural and urban poor and thus providing access to government welfare and benefits. Second, it was meant to identify and eliminate ‘fake’, ‘duplicate’ and ‘ghost’ identities to defraud the welfare system (Nair, 2018, p. 143). Nair (2018, p. 153) stated that instead of providing benefits or entitlements, Aadhaar turned out as a surveillance technology ‘understood and contested through entwined ideas of identity, belonging, and criminality’ and identified blurred categories and boundaries of ‘what differentiates the body of the innocent from the culpable, the citizen from the illegal immigrant’ in post-colonial India.

While most border studies interested in biometrics in the EU have been concerned with the role of borders in relation to people and people’s bodies, we argue that the shift towards attempts to make national borders permeable for biometric data exchange deserves further attention. We call such borders ‘bioborders’ and assume that unpacking such bioborders will help us to understand how they shape new forms of surveillance of ‘risky groups’ across Europe. Bioborders emerge as a result of heterogeneous attempts to organize data border-crossings. The shift of focus towards making borders permeable for data exchange may also help make visible the multiplicity of nation-states’ situations and their different approaches, from enforcement to ‘laissez faire’, to data bordering practices and help us understand how different nations install different modalities of border control for biometric data and have multiple and diverse social considerations about its associated ethical impacts for tracked and implicated people.

The purposeful acts of creating and configuring bioborders are also better understood by using van Houtum and van Naerssen’s (2002) notion of ‘b/ordering practices’. The authors highlight the close connection between the different bordering and ordering practices which simultaneously co-create normative, regulatory and organizational orders constructing differences. Modes of ordering emerge as attempts to regulate what happens on one nation’s side of the border and on the other and what happens to those who cross the border. While van Houtum and van Naerssen use the concept of ‘b/ordering’ to highlight the impact of ordering practices on people, our approach is interested in the organizational, regulatory and normative ordering processes for data border-crossings. Van Houtum and van Naerssen also explore the practices of ordering and othering people, thus emphasizing how differences become reinforced. Complementarily, our approach analyses attempts to enable quasi-borderless data flow as an attempt to undo the legal, scientific, technical, political and ethical differences across borders.

In this book, we argue that biometric database systems constructed in the JHA area for security and surveillance purposes deserve additional attention beyond their explicit use in migration and border control. Transnational law enforcement and police cooperation building increasingly on biometric data information systems are framed in policy discourse as promoting forms of integration across EU Member States (Council of the European Union, 2003). However, different dynamics shape how multiple occurrences of the state’s rooted autonomy and the integration ambitions of EU institutions meet and configure diverse bioborders for data exchange.

Debordering and Rebordering Dynamics

This book furthers the analysis on ‘biobordering’ (Amelung & Machado, 2019) to explore the establishment of transnationally applied biometric technologies. Such biometric technologies come explicitly with regulation of how data may (or may not) cross the borders of nation-states and implicitly produce a heterogeneous landscape of historically contingent and intentional reordering processes that partially overcome and partially reinforce nation-states’ territorial borders through bodies, data and technology.

A particular ‘biometric imaginary’ (Gunnarsdóttir & Rommetveit, 2017) drives attempts to track the mobility of certain people in the context of crime control across state borders. This imaginary builds on the idea that the more data is exchanged, the more useful it is, and that the expected benefit of such technologies is to enhance the security of societies (Prainsack & Toom, 2010).

We understand the transnational biometric technology systems enacted for law enforcement to be ‘attempts to expand biometric data exchange and establish “borderlessness” for data flows and to overcome the logics of nation-state boundaries’ (Amelung & Machado, 2019, p. 396). The aim of such endeavours is to diminish technical, scientific, operational and legal obstacles, resulting in increasingly permeable bioborders (ibid). Yet, the nation-state’s situated modes of ordering may derive from territorially driven logics in which the state’s autonomy drives the creation or maintenance of its own systems for collecting, sharing and protecting biometric data. Therefore, nation-states’ trajectories of biometric databasing remain contingent on their own historically and culturally shaped political–judicial paths of biometric technology and database development. Bioborders are thus understood as historically grown boundaries separating different national systems of biometric data collection. In order to allow biometric data to cross a nation-state’s territorial borders, bioborders need to become reordered and constructed in a way that interconnects national infrastructures of regulatory, biometric, information technology and organizational dimensions dedicated to the retention of biometric data.

The ambition to create expansive biometric data exchange requires what we call the debordering of historically grown bioborders: bioborders must be made permeable and data made available across borders (Amelung & Machado, 2019). By ‘expansive’ biometric data exchange, we refer foremost to the extent of types of data made available as well as to the extent of connections built which in consequence affect the scope of exposure of data subjects to international police collaboration. At the same time, when confronted with requirements to make their data available, actor networks in the Member States respond by raising a diverse range of concerns over data protection, technical infrastructure, and the need to install appropriate safeguards and oversight to prevent malfunctions of the data exchange systems. Consequently, actor networks in Member States may create conditions that reinforce bioborders—what we call rebordering—by making them only selectively permeable and by putting data border-crossings under stricter regimes of control.

We follow Rumford’s (2012) invitation to make a ‘multiperspectival study of borders’ by differentiating and combining perspectives of ‘seeing like a state’ and ‘seeing like a border’. Rumford offers a couple of reflections that correspond with our approach. He proposes that state-centred views on borders should not be seen exclusively as synonymous with a predominant interest in territorial nation-state borders. Furthermore, he assumes that borders do not always work in the service of the state. Finally, he states that ineffectual borders may be in place in spite of, or even through, local or partial bordering practices.

In line with Rumford (2012), our approach favours a specific way of ‘seeing like a state’. That is, we shift away from notions of the EU or the Member States as coherent, rational and intentionality-driven actors towards the distributed, yet collective, agency of a heterogeneous set of actors with multiple intentions and rationalities, potentially even conflicting ones. They may rely on different but co-existing nation-state referencing rationalities. Distributed agency then—as explained above—is attributed also to advanced technologies involved in the technoscience of biometrics and database exchange (Rammert, 2008). ‘Seeing like a border’ in our context provides insights into how national autonomy and sovereignty are claimed, negotiated and suspended not only through legal and political bordering processes but also through scientific and technical bordering practices that correspond with techno-political cultures and that manifest specific regimes for biological data retention and exchange. In order to specify that idea for the dynamic of debordering, we can imagine a commitment to expansive biometric data exchange as driven by policy-makers establishing the legal conditions, but at the same time it can be also driven by a forensic technocracy establishing scientific and technical conditions (Prainsack & Toom, 2010). Thereby the established technical solutions and their rationales itself may contribute to facilitate and expand the data exchange and create further affordances to maintain or advance the data exchange as might become plausible when considering recent trends towards interoperability between database systems (see Chap. 2). An important distinction with regard to debordering dynamics is related to the range of influence which we call either circumscribed or diffusive debordering. We may find debordering oriented towards expanding the data flows bounded to the own nation-state’s bioborders. Such circumscribed debordering refers to the expansion of data exchange via types of data made available and/or the speed of making and the number of connections. The expansion influences the scope of one’s country data exchange network and the volume and/or categories of data. In consequence, circumscribed debordering, firstly, expands the volume of data and/or the type of data subjects that are exposed to possible matching with other data from other countries’ databases. Secondly, it enlarges the exposure of data subjects to wider geographical data landscapes by including the exchange with more country databases and to additional transnational law enforcement. We may find diffusive debordering as attempts of expanding debordering beyond one’s own country, for instance, via spreading the political principles, technologies, IT infrastructures, tacit knowledge and trainings on Prüm operations in order to deborder bioborders of other nation-states.

While, as one form of biobordering practice, debordering dynamics might conceptually be more intuitive than rebordering dynamics, since debordering conforms with formal EU policy agendas and policies around integration, it is important to understand that debordering comes with a specific mode of ordering. We present the EU’s political and technical attempts to secure the unhindered cross-border flow of biometric data among Member States as a levelling mode of ordering aimed at diminishing technical, scientific and legal ‘obstacles’.

Our take on rebordering deserves three further clarifications so that rebordering is not confused with a simple failure of nation-state embedded sets of actors to secure more than a nominal implementation of the initial ambition of debordering dynamics. First, understanding rebordering as a distributed agency comes with the consequence that it is not necessarily a deliberately agreed-upon and intentional process designed by the whole actor network involved in biobordering dynamics aimed at restricting data exchange across bioborders. Instead, it can be an ambiguous process deriving from multiple constellations of intentions, motives and unintended, but tolerated, developments that result in the maintenance or creation of technical, scientific, operational and legal idiosyncrasies. Measured with the debordering ambition, such constellations may be understood as ‘obstacles’ and restrictions to ‘borderless’ data exchange. Consequently, the mode of ordering in rebordering dynamics might be driven by emphasizing aspects of nation-state autonomy and therefore reclaiming borders to manifest specific conditions for expansive data exchange.

Second, taking the regulatory dimension into consideration as one partial site for driving rebordering dynamics outlines how the state’s monopoly on pre-establishing national law shapes specific legacies. Such legacies play out in how transnational collaboration in law enforcement has changed, but also in how legal data protection and human/civil rights regimes have evolved differently (Fiodorova, 2018). These contingencies deserve attention not only with regard to how they form judicial and legal ‘obstacles’ for the establishment of cross-border collaboration, including information exchange, but also for the ways in which they contribute to harmonizing regimes to protect civil and human rights that are potentially disproportionally under threat. National laws—for example, criminal law, immigration law and data protection law—‘do not generally transcend national borders’ (Bantekas & Nash, 2007, p. 407). Thus, national laws are contained within territorial limits rooted in state sovereignty and its implementation of judicial, administrative and coercive powers. From a legal viewpoint, it was for a long time safe to say that country borders signalled that one legal order had ended and another begun (Fiodorova, 2018, p. 7). As we have made clear, this is no longer the case: transnational criminality has challenged legal country borders.

Third, in order to understand the somewhat counter-intuitive dynamics of rebordering better, we rely on Saskia Hufnagel’s comparative work on the EU and Greater China, which has explored the facilitation of cross-border flows of police information (Hufnagel, 2017). The author argues that human rights are necessitating the building of ‘congestions’ that stop or slow down the flow of information. She specifically explores different forms of obstacle to the ‘free flow’ of policing. She argues further that the free flow of policing is not in anyone’s interests, since in democratic politics, the police—as an executive branch of the government—is supposed to serve and not potentially harm the people.

We build on the idea of legitimate ‘obstacles’ that are justified to the nation as a valid barrier and restriction to borderless data exchange and explore the justifications and legitimacy claims behind attempts to restrict free cross-border information flow. Yet, we do so in a broad sense, by not only referring to different regimes of human rights and jurisdictions but also including ‘obstacles’ that are considered legitimate as being in the national interest or more specifically in the interest of the national people. An important distinction to Hufnagel’s conceptualization (2017) is related to the understanding of human rights within the EU. In comparing the EU as a single entity with Greater China, she is working with the assumption that the EU has a shared human rights regime. Our approach remains sensitive to the differences between EU Member States not only in human rights practices but also with regard to technical, scientific, operational and other legal practices that are linked to legitimacy claims rationalized through national collective subjectivities and democratic justifications.

The Establishment and Performance of Bioborders in Europe

By taking inspiration from Johnson, Williams, and Martin (2003, p. 26), we can advance towards the different material, regulatory and epistemic layers that contribute to the establishment of bioborders. Johnson et al. (2003, p. 26) proposed four constitutive components of national criminal DNA databases, which we have built on to reflect on data exchange flows across them (Amelung & Machado, 2019, p. 397):

  • Regulations, legislative frameworks and governance principles of the countries sanctioning the collection, use and retention of DNA data, including data protection regimes

  • DNA technology development, including the scientific knowledge that DNA technologies build on, material artefacts and biological resources like samples and paperwork

  • Technical database infrastructures necessary to digitally store and compare data and the definition and management of data categories applied to databases

  • Organizational imperatives and principles, such as reliability, transparency and public accountability, which translate into work routines such as inputting biometric data, reporting hits, following up correspondence when there are matches and providing transparent and publicly available statistics

We consider these legal and regulatory, techno-scientific biometrical, IT database and organizational components to be constitutive of border infrastructures. Agency is distributed across a heterogeneous actor network of regulators, security professionals, forensic technocratic experts and other criminal justice systems’ stakeholders who are involved in national biometric data collection and retention and in operational data exchange and who jointly contribute to the constitution of bioborders (Table 3.1).

Table 3.1 Analytical heuristic for the study of bioborders
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In order to portray and typify different bordering dynamics, we use the following three analytical dimensions in making cross-country comparisons of the bioborders in question:

  • The national legacies of DNA databases and DNA technologies and how they produce particular notions of nationhood and are linked to nation-state-bound legitimacy claims

  • The promises/expectations/criminological interests of Member States deciding to commit, or not, to joining the transnational DNA data exchange system and how these co-produce notions of the integration/disintegration of Europe

  • What data travels across borders and, thus, who counts as a suspect, offender or differently eligible for data exchange and how expansive/restrictive is the data exchange with regard to how many categories are exchanged and with how many countries

We propose to analyse the national historical legacies that shape DNA databasing, DNA technologies and transnational DNA data exchange as acts of imagining the nationhood. We approach ‘nationhood’ inspired by Benedict Anderson’s take on nations as ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 2006). His approach builds on an abstract sense of imagined belonging, ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (Anderson, 2006, p. 6). We complement Anderson’s perspective on imagined communities with the co-constitution of specific politics of belonging. As proposed by Yuval-Davis (2006), such politics separate the world population into ‘us’ and ‘them’, thereby including some people/and excluding others. By following this approach, we aim to remain sensitive to post-colonialist criticism, which considers the historical experience of colonization and dispossession and the relationship between the processes of colonization and criminalization. Such an approach refuses to take offending rates at face value and argues that the contribution of institutional practices and legal frameworks within which criminalization is embedded needs to be taken into account. That is, it argues that institutional practices contribute to reproducing marginalized peoples as criminal subgroups and therefore reconsiders the reasons for their overrepresentation in the criminal justice system (Wacquant, 1997).

Prüm and ‘De- and Rebordering’ of the Actor Network at the EU Level

After the Prüm Convention was incorporated into the EU’s legal framework through the Prüm Decisions, all Member States were obligated to establish or appropriate the technical infrastructure needed for the implementation of DNA databases. They were also required to enact adequate legislation to set up the operational requirements needed to establish connections with other Member States and exchange data (Sallavaci, 2015, 2017).

The deadline for all EU countries to comply with Prüm Decisions was August 2011. However, most countries were unable to comply with the deadline for various reasons (McCartney, Wilson, & Williams, 2011; Prainsack & Toom, 2013). Some faced difficulties mobilizing political majorities to adapt national laws to Prüm provisions; some faced conflicts between stakeholders over who should take responsibility for Prüm; and others lacked human and financial resources (Prainsack & Toom, 2013; Töpfer, 2011). In addition, although the first DNA databases emerged in Europe from 1995, countries like Portugal or Poland had yet to put a database in place by 2005.

As Amelung and Machado (2019) have shown, the levelling mode of ordering, which builds on the distributed but collective agency of the heterogeneous actor network at the EU level, enforced a specific version of bioborders: the political biometric imaginary that the interoperability of DNA databases is a mere technical issue. Attempts at integration and debordering are undertaken by approaches aimed at the standardization and harmonization of scientific and technical procedures between forensic genetic laboratories based in different countries. Yet, confronted with the differences in the scientific and technical conditions among Member States, such standardization involves a continuous process of negotiation.

It is inherent in transnational attempts, such as Prüm, to control crime that they restructure the game of criminal investigation and evidence and the rules of criminal justice centred on the power of the state. Initiatives to expand and automate information exchange across borders and to build on specific forms of intelligence, such as biometrics, as constitutive components of cross-border collaboration reconfigure and try to standardize what counts as a ‘crime’ and a ‘convicted criminal’, a ‘criminal suspect’ and a ‘victim’. These attempts of standardization are thought to be as effective as possible when as many countries as possible join the data exchange on the one hand and when data categories are aligned on the other hand.

Data categories related to the DNA analysis files being exchanged within the Prüm system cover a wide range, including convicted persons, suspects, crime stains, victims, unidentified persons, unidentified human remains, missing persons, relatives of missing persons and others.

According to the information provided by the Council of the EU in February 2020, Portugal and Greece allow the other Member States the least access to their data in terms of different data categories (Council of the European Union, 2020). They only provide access to files of two categories of data: Portugal to the categories of DNA profiles of ‘convicted’ persons and ‘crime stains’; Greece to the categories of ‘suspects’ and ‘crime stains’. Other operational countries share between files related to three or eight data categories. The most common categories exchanged with other countries are ‘convicted’ persons (shared by 25 out of 26 operational countries), ‘suspects’ and ‘crime stains’ (shared by 25 out of 26 operational countries), and ‘unidentified human remains’ (shared by 17 out of 26 operational countries).

As we have outlined in this chapter, at the EU level, we find a levelling mode of ordering at work that aims to diminish the technical and legal obstacles that contribute to debordering dynamics. Political and legal entities are aiming to harmonize crime control across the Member States through common scientific–technical standards applied in the exchange of DNA data and materialized in the digital infrastructure of a decentralized database system. The Prüm system at the EU level enacts a version of bioborders, increasing their permeability across states and thus fostering a hidden integration through technology.

This provides the basis for a closer look at how different biobordering regimes have evolved among Member States and how their modes of ordering have responded to the EU’s debordering tendencies. In the next chapters, we present empirical cases that reveal the emergent processes of de- and rebordering that are maintaining and contesting a sense of Europe and enforcing references to state autonomy. The focus on the Prüm system enables us to portray diverse instances from Member State-embedded actor networks of biobordering and thus to provide a complex picture of the hidden (dis)integration of Europe.

The following chapters continue to explore cases from five European countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and the UK. These specific jurisdictions have been selected with the aim of presenting examples of the dynamics, tensions and ambivalences of biobordering processes. We emphasize the legal, scientific, technical, political and civic epistemological dimensions related to the governance and use of biometric technologies and demonstrate how certain patterns of biobordering become distinct, how expansive or restrictive—as debordering or rebordering—dynamics of biometric data exchange are obtained.

As Table 3.2 shows, the five country cases are different with regard to when they initiated their DNA database. While the UK, the Netherlands and Germany were among the early starters in the EU, beginning implementation at the end of the 1990s, Portugal and Poland only started their DNA database a decade later. The selected countries’ databases have also developed differently with regard to their size,Footnote 1 partly because of when they were started, but also because of their differing inclusion and retention regimes. While Poland and Portugal have comparably small databases, Germany and the Netherlands have average databases (also in comparison with other EU Member States), and the UK has by far the largest database in the EU. The selected countries also represent a broad variety of European cases with regard to when they joined the Prüm system. The Netherlands and Germany were among the initial signatories of the Prüm Convention; Poland and Portugal were among a later generation of countries to join. The UK is the latest country to have joined the Prüm system and, given its exit from the EU, its future participation remains ambiguous.

Table 3.2 National database characteristics
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Their involvement in the DNA data exchange differs widely. Taking a closer look again at the example of the data categories of DNA analysis files, we find a diversity among those five countries regarding their availability to exchange specific data categories.

Considering the selected countries in the focus of this book, the Netherlands covering six and Poland covering five different data categories are among those countries exchanging files of a higher number of categories (see Table 3.3). Germany and the UK tend to be more restrictive by exchanging data files of only three different data categories. Portugal is among the countries providing the most limited access to DNA analysis files.

Table 3.3 National DNA analysis files available for exchange (selected countries)
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Finally, the criminal justice systems in Europe have been differently shaped by their respective legal systems, which shape how the custody of forensic DNA databases and the provision of forensic services are practically organized (Santos, Machado, & Silva, 2013). A substantial distinction is whether the justice system is adversarial or inquisitorial, as this can have an impact on which institution is the custodian of the DNA database. Most continental countries, including the Netherlands, Germany and Portugal, follow the inquisitorial system: the public prosecutor has the burden of proof, owns the monopoly of criminal investigation and, assisted by the police, has the power to initiate the necessary diligences (Hindmarsh & Prainsack, 2010). In adversarial systems, such as that in the UK, the judge plays an active role as ‘fact finder’ and is regarded as the ‘experts of experts’, while the disputing parties (the prosecution and the defence) present their versions of the facts and might have unequal access to resources and experts. Poland is considered to have a mixed system (Ryan, 2016).