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.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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