The role of trust in the exchange of police information in the European multilevel system

Information sharing among security agencies in the EU and beyond has rapidly grown in importance due to the development of information and communication technology and the reaction to security threats mostly related to new forms of terrorism that have emerged since the late 1990s. The paper shows that enhanced information sharing has produced tensions between security interests and data protection. The EU is trying to facilitate information sharing and to force police agencies to apply the principle of availability, establishing the rule that police agencies should share information with agencies from other EU Member States in the same way as with agencies from their own country. However, the paper shows that the strategy to force information sharing by legal rules does not sufficiently take into account the role of trust as a prerequisite for the effective exchange of police information.