Paris is pressing Brussels for a radical overhaul of the bloc's criminal records system. The demand comes after it emerged a Romanian national suspected of murdering a 12-year-old girl in Paris was free to travel across Europe despite a prior conviction for rape.
The suspect, identified by French prosecutors as 23-year-old Dănuț Matei, was arrested in Switzerland on Friday. He is alleged to have killed the girl, named Louise, near her home in the southern Paris suburb of Villefontaine. Police say she was sexually assaulted and stabbed.
Now the French interior ministry is saying the system is broken. A source close to the minister told me: 'This is a catastrophe. A man convicted of a serious sexual offence in one member state was able to move freely and commit an even more heinous crime. We cannot allow this to happen again.'
The current framework, the European Criminal Records Information System (ECRIS), was meant to allow member states to share information on criminal convictions. In theory, a judge can request details of a suspect's prior record from other countries. In practice, it is slow, bureaucracy-heavy and deeply inconsistent.
The problem is not new. The European Commission has been trying to patch ECRIS for years. But this case is different. It involves a child. It involves a murder. The political pressure is now immense.
President Macron is facing a backlash from the hard-right. Marine Le Pen has already called for a 'European Schengen moratorium' until the system is fixed. Macron's interior minister is due to meet his EU counterparts in Brussels next week. A source in the Elysée said the president wants 'concrete action, not more reports'.
The British government has been caught on the back foot. A Whitehall source admitted to me that the Home Office had been 'monitoring the situation' but insisted the UK's own criminal records system was 'robust'. Yet this is the same government that left the EU partly to 'take back control' of borders. The irony is not lost on officials in Brussels.
Backbench Tories are already circling. One former minister told me: 'If a convicted rapist from Romania can roam freely across Europe and kill a child in France, how can we honestly say Brexit has made us safer?' It is a question that will not go away.
The European Commission is now facing a critical test. This is not a technical issue. It is a political firestorm. If they fumble this, the entire Schengen project takes a hit. The populists are already sharpening their knives.
Expect a major push from France for a mandatory, real-time EU-wide criminal database. Expect resistance from states with strong data privacy traditions like Germany and Austria. The argument will be framed as security versus rights. I suspect security will win this round.
More details emerging as we speak. The suspect's movements are being traced. There are unconfirmed reports he also had a previous arrest in Italy. The Italian ministry declined to comment.
Watch this space. The game has changed.
