(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)
In a decision published on 13 March, the Conseil d'État, the French highest administrative court, cancelled the ministerial order ("Arrêté") by which the Interior Ministry created the ELOI file, a database aimed at facilitating the expulsion of illegal migrants. On 2 October 2006, four French NGOs filed this case against the Interior minister: CIMADE and GISTI (two associations defending the rights of migrants), LDH (the French Human Rights League), and French EDRI member IRIS. While the database creation itself is allowed by the French code on immigration and asylum (CESEDA), the NGOs argued that the ELOI file would contain excessive and inadequate personal data on the foreigners themselves, their children, the citizens with which they were staying, and their visitors in retention centres. Moreover, these data were supposed to be kept for an excessive duration.
During the proceedings of the case, the French Ministry of Interior had to downsize its expectations, recognizing that no data should be kept on some categories of retention centres visitors (members of Parliament, social workers, doctors, and specially habilitated NGOs, like volunteers from CIMADE). It also had to recognize that keeping data about visitors for 3 months rather than 3 years was enough, clearly showing how arbitrarily this duration had been initially set.
However, at this step the Conseil d'État has only based its decision on a procedural issue: given that the database was supposed to include a digitised photograph of illegal migrants, the ministry of Interior should not have created the database by a simple ministerial order, but rather by an administrative decree ('Décret') submitted to the Conseil d'État after consulting the CNIL, the French data protection authority.
Beyond the fact that the French administrative court reminded the French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy - who is currently running for French presidency - that he, too, had to obey the law, this decision acknowledges that a digitised photograph is a biometric identifier, even when not processed by automatic facial recognition software. Although based on the CESEDA rather than on the French data protection law, this ruling by the highest administrative court is important since there is no official definition in France of what is a biometric identifier.
On the very day of the ruling, the French Ministry of Interior announced that it had submitted the new draft decree to the CNIL, and that "the Conseil d'État has not found valid the arguments claiming that the ELOI database was infringing fundamental freedoms". This claim is refuted by the 4 NGOs in a press release, since the French court has judged first, as usual, upon procedural arguments, without the need to examine the substance of the complaint. The NGOs announced that if the new database characteristics remain the same, this would be as unacceptable as the former file. They now call the CNIL and the Conseil d'État to make fundamental rights prevail on the temptation of generalized indexing of people.
French ministry of Interior press release (in French only, 13.03.07)
http://www.interieur.gouv.fr/misill/sections/a_la_une/toute_l_actualit...
Cancelling of ELOI file: after the victory of law, the CNIL and the Conseil
d'État must make rights prevail (in French only, 13.03.2007)
http://www.iris.sgdg.org/info-debat/comm-eloi0307.html
IRIS dossier on the case, with all legal documents (in French only)
http://www.iris.sgdg.org/actions/fichiers/index.html
(Contribution by Meryem Marzouki, EDRI member IRIS - France)