A/HRC/4/26 page 7 European Union (EU) has explicitly asked its member States to cooperate with one another and with Europol (the European police office) to develop “terrorist profiles”, defined as “a set of physical, psychological or behavioural variables, which have been identified as typical of persons involved in terrorist activities and which may have some predictive value in that respect”.2 A group of experts from Europol and several EU member States has been established for this purpose.3 Terrorist profiling also occurs in less explicit forms. For example, law-enforcement agents often rely on sets of physical or behavioural characteristics when deciding whom to stop and search for counter-terrorism purposes. 33. “Profiling” is generally defined as the systematic association of sets of physical, behavioural or psychological characteristics with particular offences and their use as a basis for making law-enforcement decisions. Profiles can be either descriptive, i.e. designed to identify those likely to have committed a particular criminal act and thus reflecting the evidence the investigators have gathered concerning this act; or they may be predictive, i.e. designed to identify those who may be involved in some future, or as-yet-undiscovered, crime. In the view of the Special Rapporteur, profiling is, in principle, a permissible means of law-enforcement activity. Detailed profiles based on factors that are statistically proven to correlate with certain criminal conduct may be effective tools better to target limited law-enforcement resources. 34. However, when law-enforcement agents use broad profiles that reflect unexamined generalizations, their practices may constitute disproportionate interferences with human rights. In particular, profiling based on stereotypical assumptions that persons of a certain “race”, national or ethnic origin or religion are particularly likely to commit crime may lead to practices that are incompatible with the principle of non-discrimination. It is therefore of grave concern to the Special Rapporteur that, since 11 September 2001, law-enforcement authorities of different States have adopted counter-terrorism practices that are based on terrorist profiles that include characteristics such as a person’s presumed “race”, ethnicity, national origin or religion. 35. The Special Rapporteur notes that terrorist profiles have been employed, for example, in the context of data-mining initiatives, i.e. searches of personal data sets according to presumed characteristics of suspects. An illustrative case is the so-called Rasterfahndung programme, initiated by the German authorities in the wake of 11 September 2001 to identify terrorist “sleepers”. The German police forces collected personal records of several million persons from 2 Council of the European Union, Draft Council Recommendation on the development of terrorist profiles, 18 November 2002 (document 11858/3/02 REV 3). 3 Council of the European Union, “Terrorist profiling (Draft reply to written question by Sarah Ludford)”, 30 March 2004 (document 7846/04).