MPs Philippe Gosselin (LR) and Philippe Latombe (MoDem) believe that France should allow law enforcement to use facial recognition, under certain conditions, in a parliamentary report released on Wednesday.
The two rapporteurs of this fact-finding mission launched in September 2022 on the use of “security images” in the public domain carried out their work with a view in particular to the Olympic Games-2024 and “the rise in power of intelligence artificial”.
A l’issue de their auditionsthey make 41 recommendations and call on France, which “does not currently have an appropriate legal framework to experiment with biometric recognition solutions” to “quickly legislate to anticipate the needs of the years to come”.
In particular, they propose to “set up an experimental framework to test biometric recognition solutions in the judicial context, to find an individual a posteriori”.
Terrorism, crime and kidnapping
They also call for authorizing “for certain cases of extreme urgency or sensitive research, the use of facial recognition software” by law enforcement and intelligence “for a limited time” and “under the control of the ‘judicial authority’.
According to their proposal, the use of facial recognition would be authorized in three cases: to find the suspect of a terrorist act or one that harms the fundamental interests of the nation; in the fight against organized crime; and for the search for a minor or his abductor in the context of a “kidnapping alert”.
The parliamentarians, however, say they are opposed to the deployment of “remote identification devices in real time in public places in a permanent and general way” and do not want facial recognition to be used for maintaining order either.
“Global overhaul” of the rules
More generally, they call for a “global overhaul” of the rules applicable to the various image capture devices, the current legal framework being according to them “sparse and difficult to read”.
They recommend in particular to “harmonize” the retention period of images, by setting it at 30 days, “regardless of the capture vector used”. They also call for “continuing reflection to extend the shelf life” of the images, saying that their mission has highlighted “difficulties” linked to a “too short” shelf life, which “can cause loss of chance for crime victims.
