The EU wants to establish a common, centralised criminal registry. Finland is a bit weary about this. Thumbs up for that!! I’m glad to see Finland is concerned for people’s privacy, even criminals. Let’s see how many months Finland can go before they give-in to the EU…

The purpose of the database would be to speed up the flow of information on known offenders between authorities of EU member countries.

Such a project would not only be very complicated and expensive, but also problematic from the point of view of Nordic data protection principles.

In Finland, the registry keeps track of mostly incarcerations, whereas fines are not recorded. The information is deleted 20 years after a conviction. In some countries, all crimes are recorded, and there may be no regulation on their deletion.