Report - Guardian

The LSE Identity Project Report: June 2005 135Experiences in Other CountriesPredictions of the likely abuse of police powers are substantiated by evidence of theimplementation of ID card schemes in other European countries. A report produced in1997, ‘Policing the Community: The impact of National Identity Cards in the EuropeanUnion’ 357 , provides a comprehensive guide to the legislation that assists the particularID card scheme and the actual police practices that have evolved in a variety ofEuropean Countries.Most importantly, the report reveals that the ‘voluntary’ schemes employed in manyEuropean countries are voluntary in semantics only, and ‘administrative’ detention ofan individual, and/or penal fines for non-disclosure, are commonplace in countrieswhere either voluntary or compulsory schemes exist. Case studies of the respectivemethods of implementation in Germany, France and the Netherlands do little to allayfears of likely racial prejudices.In Germany, police responses to questions on the identity card checks revealed anawareness of racial discrimination laws. The police argued that minorities are alsowhite, and consequently discrimination in ID checks was rare. German civil rightsgroups begged to differ, asserting that, despite many migrants being white, there werevisible differences between them and the native German population. The report’sauthors accompanied the police in Germany for a period of time and observed that theGerman police were stopping higher numbers of people from ethnic minorities. Theofficers explained that this was a necessary measure to combat illegal immigration.Similar patterns affecting ethnic minorities emerged in studies conducted in theNetherlands. Although the system was voluntary at the time, strong links to the identitycard’s role in combating illegal immigration created ‘obvious’ potential for abuse, andduring observations by the authors, a tip-off concerning a factory was investigated onthe basis that the employees were ‘foreign looking’.In France, the study reported similar levels of prejudice, although tensions betweenethnic minorities and the police seemed more heightened. The Institute for AdvancedStudies in Internal Security (IHESI) drew attention to the link between the cards andtightening immigration law adding that: “although the card itself provided no threat tocivil liberties, the police powers to check ID provided an ever growing intrusion.”According to Mouloud Aounit, the secretary general of the French anti-racism groupMRAP:“They aren't in themselves a force for repression, but in the currentclimate of security hysteria they facilitate it... Young people ofAlgerian or Moroccan descent are being checked six times a day.” 358357 ‘Policing the Community: The Impact of National Identity Cards in the European Union’ by Adrian Beck andKate Broadhurst (Scarman Centre for the Study of Public Order), Journal of European Migration Studies, 1998.358 ‘ID cards may cut queues but learn lessons of history, warn Europeans’, Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian,November 15, 2003.