Irish justice minister Alan Shatter announced today that a new agreement between the United States and the European Union could see a sharing of DNA and fingerprints of citizens amongst countries.

Such sharing would occur only “in specific and defined circumstances” and would hope to achieve new level of crime prevention in both nations.

The Irish Examiner reports that justice minister Shatter announced the new initiative at the justice, defense and equality committee.
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The plan would elect a national contact person who would could “access and search the fingerprint reference data and DNA reference data of the other party" to see if matches are found.

Shatter elaborated that the system would not provide an exchange of information, rather a search to see if there is a match between the countries’ sets of data.

He added further that the sharing of information would only be used for "the prevention, detection and investigation of serious crime.”