Serious Violent or Sexual Offenders Travelling Across EU Borders. Ideological and Ethical Challenges of Information Exchange.

Abstract

The increase in travel opportunities coupled with open borders across much of the European Union has resulted in increased capacity for serious violent or sexual offenders to travel or migrate to other Member States within the EU. In some instances this results in (ex)offenders living and working in Member States with less monitoring, regulation or supervision than they would experience in their home Member State; and in some cases without any tracking or information exchange about their known criminality. In 2013 an EU funded project reviewed current information exchange systems within the EU, and the challenges and issues faced by law enforcement and probation service personnel when seeking to work collaboratively with other EU Member States to manage the risk posed by this small number of high risk offenders. This article reviews the key issues from that research, and most notably the differences in perceptions of privacy, data protection restrictions on information exchange, rights to free movement post sentence, and a range of legal and ethical constraints upon the choices and actions of law enforcement and probation personnel. Underlying ideological and philosophical differences, particularly across Probation practice, can be discerned focused on the relative weight that risk, desistance or rehabilitation should play in response to these offenders. This article examines the implications of these differences for the effective management of serious violent or sexual offenders who are mobile across the EU community.