Terms and Conditions (Job Seeker)

Service: ‘Job Seeker’s Criminal Record Check’

 

Version 1.5. updated on 11th January 2024

 

PLEASE READ THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS CAREFULLY BEFORE ORDERING OUR SERVICES. By ordering our services, you agree to abide by the Terms and Conditions described on this page.

IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO ALL OF THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS SET FORTH HEREIN, PLEASE DO NOT USE THE SERVICE IN ANY WAY. The Terms and Conditions are a binding agreement between European Criminal Records Information Services and you.

European Criminal Records Information Services (“we”, “our”) is continually improving and adding new services. These improvements (or changes in the law) may require changes to these Terms and Conditions. Accordingly, we reserve the right to update or modify these Terms and Conditions at any time without prior notice. We will do so by posting an updated or modified version of these Terms and Conditions on this Site. Your use of our services following any such change constitutes your agreement to comply with and be bound by these Terms and Conditions. For this reason, we encourage you to review these Terms and Conditions regularly.

  1. Definitions

Site means the website located at www.ecris.eu;

Application Form means the form to be used for ordering our services as set forth in Section 4 of these Terms and Conditions;

Criminal Records Certificate (“CRC”) means a document that shows your criminal records or lack of thereof, issued by the NCRB of the Intermediate Country based on the information provided by the NCRB of the Target Country;

Report means a file in a portable document format (PDF) containing the cover that includes our contact details, our remarks and information to the recipients, scans of the CRCs from the Target Countries and its ordinary English translation;

Additional language version means a Report in a language version other than English, provided in addition to the English version of the Report.

European Union Criminal Record Check (EUCRC) means a service of obtaining a CRC in the country/countries of your citizenship(s) and creating a Report with a cover page displaying the service name, legal basis and explanation of the mechanism allowing the EUCRC to be considered a valid source of information on your criminal history in the whole European Union. A variation of this service is a EUCRC Report which filters out any information found, as a byproduct of the process, in countries other than the target country indicated by the Client and displayed in the cover page of the Report. Whenever the EUCRC service is used to provide a Report narrowing the scope of information to the indicated target country, the abbreviation ‘(EU)’ follows the named of such country in order to distinguish this service from the CRC obtained directly form the criminal register of the Target Country. In certain cases a CRC being a part of the Report may indicate a conviction was found in a country other than the country of your choice, without giving any details of such a conviction.

The fact the European Union or a given country is named in the cover page of the Report does not mean we conducted a CRC directly in all the EU member states or in that given country, but that the Report presents the actual state of affairs basing on the assumption the relevant state authorities of the EU member states fulfil their statutory obligations imposed by the Council Framework Decision 2009/315/JHA of 26 February 2009 (especially Articles 4, 5 and 7) and, where applicable, its transpositions into member states’ national laws.  Failure to fulfil such duties by the member states NCRBs could results in the Report showing ‘false negatives’.

This service covers the period reaching back to April 2012 during which the data subject was a citizen of the state(s) providing the information. We obtain a valid proof of the citizenship before conducting the check, however we do not verify its duration, which is communicated to the recipients of the report.

National Criminal Records Bureau (“NCRB”) means the state agency of the respective country that governs nationwide court register of convicted and detained persons in that country.

Target Country means the country from which the information appearing in the CRC is gathered.

Intermediate Country means the country where the NCRB of our choice, through which the CRC is obtained, is headquartered;

National Criminal Records Bureau of the Intermediate Country (“NCRBIC”) means the state agency of the Intermediate Country that governs nationwide court register of convicted and detained persons in that country, requests information on criminal convictions from NCRBs of the Target Countries, collects replies to such requests and releases it in the CRCs it issues.

Business day means any day, which is a business day in the United Kingdom, in the Intermediate Country and in the Target Country at the same time.

Turnaround time (“TAT”) means a number of business days taken to fulfil our service.

GDPR means the General Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council.

Irish Criminal Record Check obtained from Garda Siochana through the Subject Access Request (“Irish SAR CRC”) means a service of filing on your behalf your Subject Access Request Form to Garda Siochana in order to obtain information on your criminal records or lack of thereof under GDPR and including this information in the Report.

 

  1. Our Service

The service is made available to the natural persons who wish to order criminal record checks on themselves and use it as a verifiable evidence of no criminal convictions, especially for non-official purposes. The service is unavailable to anyone intending to conduct a criminal record check on a third party, for, or on someone’s behalf.

We provide CRCs for all countries listed on our Site. Where all required information is made available, we will initiate the process to obtain CRCs the same or the following Business Day the Application Form you completed and signed is received as a hard copy, original document. We return a complete Report via email same or the following Business Day the CRC is collected from the NCRBIC.

Although the reply issued by the NCRBIC may consist of the Intermediate Country specific CRC and the reply from the Target Country, the Report does not include the former. You may request to obtain the full documentation released by the NCRBIC after further arrangements.

As part of our standard service we provide ordinary translations of the CRCs into English. Should you request us to perform tasks or services, which are outside the scope of our standard service, a separate fee shall be agreed in advance.

Taking into account our legal and market expertise, as well, as current legal and organisational circumstances, we suggest a legal basis for your application for the information on your convictions, aiming to guarantee the highest possible quality, scope and completeness of the data, trustworthiness of the source of the information, mitigation of the risk of receiving ‘false negatives’ or ‘false positives’, ability to demonstrate due diligence in obtaining the information, compliance with national and EU laws, formality of the criminal record certificate and its eligibility for an apostille or legalisation. The actual legal basis for your request is always outlined in your personalised Application Form. As we guarantee the Report we provide includes information obtained in the above-described manner and deriving from state authorities, we do not recommend it as a substitute to any specific type of criminal records certificate issued by state authorities basing on non-GDPR/Data Protection related national laws, whenever such a document is explicitly required by its intended recipients.

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, we do not obtain any information through enforced subject access requests under Article 15 of the GDPR, under Data Protection Act 2018 (United Kingdom) or under Section 91 of the Data Protection Acts 2018 (Republic of Ireland).

  1. Terms of Service

You acknowledge that:

  1. The CRC and its translations may have diacritical marks replaced with plain letters.
  2. Format of CRC included in the Report depends on the document received from the NCRB of the Target Country.
  3. Our services are provided on the basis of your personal power of attorney granted to our representative.
  4. Some fields of the CRCs may include descriptions of offences and penalties in the native tongue of the Target Country, which are not translated into English as a standard service.
  5. Convictions revealed in the CRCs may contain naming, description or legal qualification specific to the law of the Target Country. We do not provide explanation to the meaning of such description of the convictions.
  6. In the event your order includes CRCs from multiple Target Countries, the complete Report is released after CRCs from all the Target Countries have been returned to the NCRBIC.
  7. If the CRC obtained from the Target Country contains errors in your personal details, the faulty CRC is returned to the NCRBIC for correction. We shall not release the faulty CRCs.
  8. We provide our Reports in Portable Document Format (PDF) and that you have technical means to view such files.
  9. In the event the Target Country decides not to carry out the search or we believe that the CRC does not represent the actual state of the matter, we will contact you and advise accordingly.
  10. NCRB in the Target Country may in some cases provide a comment in the CRC implying that the check has not been carried out or that the application has been rejected, even though the check was actually carried out and represents informative value. You acknowledge that these comments do not represent the actual state of the matter and appear due to technical purposes and that the service is deemed completed, thus these comments do not constitute grounds for refund of our service charges. Description and sample reports including examples of such misleading comments in the CRCs are available on our Site.
  11. In the event you decide to resubmit the application you agree you may have to provide us with a new Application Form as set forth in Section 4.
  12. CRCs may contain spent convictions and other information, which do not have legal significance or do not have it any longer. It is your sole responsibility to determine which information may be used in the process, for which the CRC was requested.
  13. Average TATs are based on the historical performance records. The most recent average TATs, measured from receipt of the hard copy by our indicated office, are available on our Site and are updated at least once a month. These TATs are not guaranteed by us and its exceeding does not constitute a basis for any claims.
  14. In the event you provided your birth name and surname, CRCs from certain Target Countries may contain only one of the two. In such cases Intermediate Country specific CRC including all the personal details used as input data by the NCRBIC to make requests to the NCRBs of Target Countries can be provided as a proof of the search having been carried out against all available Subject’s personal details.
  15. In some cases the CRC from the country of your citizenship may include information on convictions from EU member states other than the Target Countries, which is transferred to the NCRB of the country of your citizenship as a mandatory procedure regulated by European laws, and you acknowledge this information cannot be removed from the Report.
  16. The cover of the report may contain our comments pertinent to the content of the Report, especially whenever we believe the information provided in the CRC could be ambiguous.
  17. The name of the public authority appearing in the Report cover page may differ from the one in the CRCs, as the former refers to the name of the criminal records register of the NCRB, whereas the latter refers to an international exchange of information division of such a criminal records register.
  18. There are certain limitations of the service pertinent to the CRCs from particular countries, as outlined on the Site. These may change from time to time, therefore we encourage you to review description of the service in each country before placing an order.
  19. We provide customer support in English only.
  20. Translation of the certificates including convictions is limited to three pages of the source document. If the certificate exceeds this limit translation is provided in a simplified manner, as an extract of the critical data.
  21. The additional language version service is limited to certificates including no convictions. If the certificate includes convictions a translation fee is calculated on an individual basis and offered to the client. If rejected, the additional language version service fee is refunded.
  22. If delivery of the hard copy of the certificate is ordered, we return only the physical hard copy documents  issued by the NCRBIC, which does not include additional pages shown in the PDF report, such as translation or cover page.
  23. You acknowledge the law in the Republic of Ireland penalizes anyone who asks you to obtain information on yourself under the Subject Access Request as per the Article 15 of the GDPR or as per the section 91 of the Irish Data Protection Act 2018 in relation to your recruitment as an employee, continuation of your employment or contract for the provision of your services, as per the section 4 of the Data Protection Act 2018. As the section 91 of the Irish Data Protection Act 2018 (Ireland) is a legal basis for carrying out of the Irish SAR CRC service, by ordering it you attest it is not done in relation to any such request made to you and you agree that your order can be cancelled without a right to claim a refund if an evidence showing a violation of this terms emerges. Furthermore you agree to compensate any involved parties for any financial losses resulting from you ordering this service as a response to the third party’s request, if you, at the order day, knew that party had been unknowingly in breach of the laws outlined in this point.
  24. We are neither affiliated with the European Criminal Records Information System scheme nor with any public authorities.

 

4. Application Form

You should complete and print out the entire Application Form made available to you, hand sign it in all required spaces, and send the hard copy, original document the postal address we specify, which may differ from our business registered address.

Scans of the completed Application Form sent to us via email help us determining its completeness, however do not allow us to initiate the check.

In the event the Application Form is not completed in full, you shall provide the missing details no later than 90 days after the initial submission of the Application Form, absence of which after this period of time will result in the Application Form being considered as abandoned and your data are being removed. Abandoned Application Form is subject to a full charge.

Any changes to the content of the application form without our authorisation render it useless.

Application form must be printed out on separate sheets of paper, leaving the back side of each page blank,  and contain your handwritten, ‘wet’ signature made with a pen, ballpoint pen or a permanent marker. Cross outs and other correction of errors are not allowed and a new application form shall be completed if an error was made. The application form may not contain any comments. Overwriting a signature with handwriting on a photocopy or a print out of a scan of a completed form already containing a signature renders the Application Form invalid.

In order to allow us to verify your identity you must provide us with a scan of the photo ID holding your signature specimen. You may electronically remove all your personal information from the said scan, other than your name, surname, ID number and your signature specimen.

Information made available to us by you, will not be made available to any third parties, not directly involved in the background screening process and will be used only for the intended purpose of our services.

  1. Verification of Reports

You may freely use your Report by sharing it with desired recipients for any purpose. Some recipients may want to verify the Report’s authenticity by contacting us. We will inform you in each such a case and seek your direction. If you wish to enable Report verification you will be asked to sign a recipient specific release form, separately for each recipient. Such a release form should be provided to us in an electronic or hard copy format before the Report verification either by you or through the party requesting verification.

By signing the release form you authorise us to pass your unedited Report, or if applicable –  its latest version on to the indicated party and you exclude us from any liability for the use of the Report and the data it holds by any such party.

Standard service includes up to three instances of seeking your consent and releasing the Report to the indicated party within three months of the Report issue date. These limits can be increased to our discretion or changed by our agreement, subject to additional charges.

We process any requests for Report verification within one business day from receipt of such a request.

  1. Payment Terms

A. Billing Policies

If you elect to order our services, you agree to the pricing and payment listed on the Site which we may update from time to time. You will receive an email with a binding quotation for the services you requested, before you are asked to complete the payment. We may add new services for additional fees and charges, or amend fees and charges for existing services, at any time in our sole discretion. Charges for any services exceeding the limits of the standard services shall be agreed on an individual basis.

B. General Payment Terms.

All payments of our services are subject to the following conditions:

  1. You can make the payment at any stage of the ordering process.
  2. We will initiate the CRC checks only for fully paid orders.
  3. We accept bank transfer and PayPal payment.
  4. Due to the way transactions are processed, delays in recording your payment in our ledger may occur.
  5. Orders will be cancelled if your payment is not received within 3 months of the date order date.
  6. Payments are to be transferred to: European Criminal Records Services, 35-37 Ludgate Hill, London EC4M 7JN, United Kingdom bank account, or via PayPal, as per our payment instructions following your order.
  7. We do not accept payment made by cheque, however alternative methods of payment can be arranged on an individual basis. You agree to cover any additional fees and charges resulting from the use of such alternative payment methods.
  8. Upon receipt of your order we send you a draft invoice for the ordered services to be paid for in advance.
  9. We will invoice you only for completed services, which were fully paid for in advance.
  10. You shall make the payment using your own account either with a bank or an alternative payments operator’s. We are not liable for the processing of any personal data of third parties obtained as a result of you completing the payment using third party’s account or delegating the payment to be completed by a third party.

 

C. Refunds Policy

  1. In the event an initiated check was put on hold by the NCRBIC or NCRB of the Target Country due to incorrect or insufficient personal information provided and you do not provide us with all required details within 3 months from that event, you understand and agree that the service is deemed initiated and that you shall receive no refund.
  2. In the event the Target Country did not provide the requested CRC, you are entitled to a refund for our services.
  3. In the event the requested CRC processed basing on the incorrect data you provided, is initiated or returned complete, you understand and agree that you shall receive no refund.
  4. Orders paid for in advance but not initiated due to the reasons laying on your side are refunded automatically after 3 months from the order date or at your request, whichever is sooner, subject to the Cancelation Policy as described in Section 7.
  5. We reserve the right to chose the payment method for any refunds.
  6. You agree any fees imposed by the banks or alternative payment operators relating to the refunds not caused by our unavailability to provide the service  will be deducted from the refunded amount and if the said fee exceeds the amount to be refunded, no refund will be made.

 

7. Cancelation Policy

You can receive a full cancelation refund of your order if you submit the cancellation notice before we submit the request to the NCRBIC for your CRC. In case of the refunds made by international bank transfer, any relevant bank fees (currently 17.00 GBP) will be deducted from the refunded amount.

You will not be eligible for a cancelation refund based on cancellation notices submitted after we have noticed you of receipt of the payment or the application form, whichever arrived later.

No refunds are applicable in case of cessation of processing of your data resulting from you exercising your data subjects rights under GDPR (e.g. consent withdrawal, restriction of processing, etc).

 

  1. Disclaimer of Warranties

We reserve the right to discontinue or alter any or all of our Site services, and to stop publishing our Site, at any time in our sole discretion without notice or explanation.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, we exclude all representations and warranties relating to the subject matter of these terms and conditions, our Site and our services.

  1. Limitation of Liability

You acknowledge that CRCs we obtain from the Target Country in specific cases may not be used in lieu of the criminal records certificates required by special laws (for specific regulated professions, industries or for formal purposes) in the respective country/countries which obligate the employers to have themselves or their employees undergo a criminal records check. Whenever you intend to use the Report for official purposes, including, but not limited to, visa applications, immigration or naturalisation procedures, lawsuits, administrative proceedings, you are solely responsible for establishing whether our Report would be regarded by relevant authorities a legally recognized and enforceable proof of your criminal record. You acknowledge that we shall not be held liable for any use of our Reports in such a manner and that we do not provide legal counselling in this matter.

You acknowledge that TATs largely depend on the response time of the NCRBIC and NCRBs involved in the process of obtaining CRCs, which is beyond our control, therefore, despite our best effort, we cannot guarantee the TATs.

You acknowledge that providing the Application Form signed by a person other than the one, whose personal details appear in this document or on behalf of such person constitutes a criminal offence of forgery. You shall be held liable for any kind of negative consequences of us processing the forged Application Forms you provide, including, but not limited to consequences of: administrative proceedings, criminal investigation, criminal prosecution, criminal conviction or civil suits, and you will compensate for any such consequences to us, our employees, other representatives of ours or any parties involved in processing of the forged Application Forms, who suffered from the said consequences.

You acknowledge that we prepare our Reports from information supplied by various NCRBs, and though we make every effort to insure the accuracy of the information, the information is provided “AS IS” and we in no way warrant or assume any liability whether directly or indirectly for the accuracy and/or completeness of the information and the turnaround time of the NCRBIC and NCRBs.

You acknowledge that the service of the European Union criminal record check and its variants limiting the Report to a single country mentioned in the Report provide a weaker proof of no criminal conviction, as the lack of information on criminal convictions handed down in a given EU member state may be a result of that member state’s NCRB failing to fulfil its statutory obligations of transmitting the information on convictions to the NCRB of your citizenship as soon as possible, which is outside of our control and for which we shall not be held liable.

 

We shall not be held liable for any loss or damage including any indirect or consequential losses or damages sustained by you or any third parties directly or indirectly as a result of the services and/or from making use of the information including but not limited to any loss or damage resulting from any inaccuracies or omissions in the information or for any delays in providing the information.

We shall not be held liable for the consequences of your decisions or decisions of any third parties made based on the Report or lack of thereof.

If you order delivery of the hard copy CRCs by mail, you agree that we shall not be held liable for any undelivered, lost or damaged mail that is beyond our control.

  1. Confidential Information

Each party agrees to maintain the confidentiality of all documents and information that the other party consider to be confidential, secret, and/or proprietary (the „Confidential Information”) received or arising during the term of or in connection with this Agreement. We shall use your Confidential Information only in connection with services rendered under this Agreement. Confidential Information does not include information that (1) is in or becomes in the public domain without violation of this Agreement, (2) is already rightfully in the possession of the party, as evidenced by written documents, prior to the disclosure thereof by the other party, or (3) is rightfully received from a third entity having no obligation to the party and without violation of this Agreement. Confidential Information shall include, but not be limited to, all financial information and personal information. The parties agree not to disclose the content or the existence of this Agreement except by mutual consent. This provision shall survive termination of this Agreement.

  1. Retention of the information

The Report and your personal information used to compose the Report is removed from our databases and the physical CRCs are destroyed after 90 days from the end of the month in which the Report was provided to you, unless mutually agreed otherwise.

  1. Severability

If any provision of these Terms and Conditions is held by a court of competent jurisdiction to be contrary to law, such provision shall be changed and interpreted so as to best accomplish the objectives of the original provision to the fullest extent allowed by law and the remaining provisions of these Terms and Conditions shall remain in full force and effect.

  1. Force Majeure

Neither party shall be liable to the other for any delay in performance or failure to perform its obligations in accordance with these Terms and Conditions where such delay or failure is due to circumstances beyond its control and unknown to it at the date of these Terms and Conditions, such circumstances including but not restricted to fire, flood, government act, and legislative constraints.

  1. Governing Law and Jurisdiction

These Terms and Conditions shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the law of the United Kingdom and any dispute arising shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Courts of the United Kingdom.

  1. Third Party Rights

The agreement under these Terms and Conditions is for our benefit and your benefit, and is not intended to benefit or be enforceable by any third party.

  1. Entire Agreement

These Terms and Conditions constitute the entire agreement between you and us with respect to your access to and/or use of this Site and our services.

Questions or comments regarding these Terms and Conditions should be directed to info@ecris.eu.

European Criminal Records Information Services CONTACT INFORMATION:

 Office 7

35-37 Ludgate Hill

London EC4M 7JN

United Kingdom

Telephone: +44 (0) 845 557 1082

Fax: +44 (0) 845 557 1083

Email info@ecris.eu

Website: www.ecris.eu