Oct 2, 2007, 14:55 GMT
Lisbon - Meeting in Lisbon nearly five months after the disappearance from a Portuguese holiday resort of Madeleine McCann, a British four-year-old girl, EU justice ministers agreed Tuesday to set up an alert system designed to help coordinate police probes dealing with cross border child abductions.
The system would be adopted on a case-by-case basis and would involve sharing a variety of information among law-enforcement agencies, including images or tapped conversations concerning the case, officials said. Such information would only be shared among the relevant countries, rather than among all 27 member states.
'We must avoid submerging authorities and the general public with useless quantities of information and should rather concentrate on targeted information,' said Franco Frattini, the EU commissioner in charge of freedom, security and justice.
The commissioner wants to use a variety of instruments to inform the public and officials about a missing child.
These include a common EU website and requests for information to be sent to individuals via mobile phones or published on electronic billboards present on motorways.
Such alerts would have to involve several member state when it is believed that the abductor may have crossed a national border.
Plans to make the system interconnect all member states in all cases in which a child is reported missing were opposed by several ministers, including those from Germany and the Netherlands.
'I would not be in favour of publishing in Denmark or Sweden the photograph of a child that has gone missing in southern Italy,' said German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries, who also suggested sending out too many alerts might end up being counter-productive.
Her Dutch colleague, Ernst Hirsch Ballin, said he would prefer only being informed about children gone missing in neighbouring countries rather than in far-away places like Latvia.
While no comprehensive data exists at EU level, scores of children are believed to go missing each week in the bloc. Most cases are resolved within a couple of days.
However, a significant number cross national borders. These usually involve disputed child custodies and see one of the parents take the child to a foreign country.
Ministers also discussed ways to crack down on child pornography and on the sexual abuse of minors.
Frattini invited ministers to discuss initiatives in place in France and Spain that see repeated offenders get monitored by the police once they are released from prison.
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