A number of
large-scale IT systems
have been developed during recent years. All of them relate to the lifting of the internal borders for citizens who travel from one country to another. Although each has a different purpose, ranging from administration of asylum applications to sharing information about missing people, these information systems share common features. Size is one (the future Visa Information System is for instance expected to deal with 20 million new entries per year), another is that they often consist of national units and a central unit.
The legal framework for data protection may vary from one system to another. To guarantee the rights of the people who are registered in these systems, it is important that consistency in the protection of data subjects is achieved. The EDPS, together with other data protection authorities, aims to achieve a high and equivalent level of protection.
In the field of police and judicial cooperation, two joint supervisory bodies ( JSB) have been created. Composed of representatives of national data protection authorities, one relates to the activities of Europol, and the other to those of Eurojust.
For
Eurodac
, CIS (ex first pillar part) and
VIS
, supervision is shared between the national data protection authorities and the EDPS, who supervises the processing in the central unit (which is subject to the Data Protection Regulation 45/2001). In order to promote good cooperation with the national authorities, the EDPS organises coordination meetings. The implementation of this " coordinated supervision model" will also be applied to other large scale IT systems, such as the future SIS II.
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