European parliament selling unused body scanners
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MEPs were outraged that their institution acquired full body scanners (Photo: Transport and Security Administration, USA)
The European Parliament is putting its six unused full body scanners up for sale, just as several EU states are buying such devices for their airports in the aftermath of a failed bomb attack on a US flight departing from Amsterdam.
Last year, the machines became a bit of an embarrassment for the EU legislature when MEPs found out that their own institution had purchased them in 2005. In October 2008, lawmakers had opposed a bill allowing the use of full body scanners in the EU, unaware of the six unused devices lying around in the basement.
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The controversial machines were bought for €725,730 as a precaution measure after the 2001 al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington.
In April last year, the plenum decided to put them up for sale. The tendering procedures are set to kick off next week, after publication in the EU's official journal. The process should be wrapped up by 26 February, according to the parliament's secretary general, Klaus Welle, in a letter seen by Germany's Sueddeutsche newspaper.
A parliament spokeswoman said that the selling process took almost a year due to the complex financial regulation procedures applying to both acquisitions and sales of the institution's assets.
The bidders will have to have a "clean record" and prove that they are financially sound, Marjory van den Broeke added.
Regarding potential criticism that the EU legislature is selling the devices just as several EU governments are considering introducing mandatory full body scans in airports, Ms van den Broeke said that there was no room for comparison. "The Parliament is not an airport", she stressed.
Despite the fact that they are not state of the art, the six machines are unlikely to have trouble in finding a buyer.
Amsterdam's main airport Schiphol, where the thwarted bomber boarded on Christmas Day, announced it will buy 60 new scanners to boost security. It already employs 15 such devices.
In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy has ordered a study of the possible use of full-body scanners amid growing worldwide security concerns, the interior minister said Wednesday. French lawmakers discussed the introduction of scanners in 2008, but the idea of deploying them was dropped amid privacy concerns.
In the UK, full body scans will be introduced within three weeks at Heathrow airport in London and will be carried out on a "random" basis, home secretary Alan Johnson said on Tuesday.
The beefed-up security strategy will rely just as much on spotting unusual behaviour among passengers, the deployment of more sniffer dogs and installing sophisticated explosives-detection equipment in all airports by the year's end.
"The scanners themselves aren't the magic bullet here," Mr Johnson said.
In Brussels, the EU commission will also examine the issue on Thursday (7 January) with national aviation security experts.
If security concerns persist, MEPs might prove more flexible this time around in approving an EU-wide roll-out of such devices. Back in 2008, they called the graphic imagery provided by the machines a "virtual strip search."
"We think that the [EU] parliament in the next round will approve the body scanners," Schiphol Group chief operating officer Ad Rutten said last week in the wake of the US incident.
