EU reverses Bulgarian life sentence for biometric criminal records

The EU’s Court of Justice has given bloc nations flexibility to decide when criminals’ biometric identifiers can be destroyed.

Even convicted criminals should have at least the hope that their data will be erased prior to their death, which is when the information now is relinquished by the Bulgarian government.

The decision follows a referral from the Bulgarian Supreme Administrative Court. A Bulgarian man had been convicted of failing to be truthful as a witness to a crime.

The witness was given a one-year suspended sentence and he was deemed “legally rehabilitated.” Some time after that, he requested to be taken out of police records but was rebuffed. The records can hold fingerprints, photos and DNA.

His crime was comparatively small, and he was considered rehabilitated, but because the biometric data could be used in future investigations, the Bulgarian government said the information had to be retained until his death.

He appealed and the administrative court brought in the Court of Justice. It found that not everyone convicted a crime should be in the public record for life.

Now, data controllers must periodically consider whether biometric information should be erased. They must also hear requests for data deletion.

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation famously includes a “right to be forgotten.”

It was not immediately known how the decision will affect negotiations over the sharing of law enforcement records between the EU and United States.

Article Topics

biometric data  |  biometric identifiers  |  biometrics  |  Bulgaria  |  criminal ID  |  data storage  |  EU