New priorites
Reports indicate that on 13 July top of the agenda will be:
- Data retention: measures to require telecoms companies and internet providers to keep details of phone and web communications for at least a year. The content of calls and e-mails would not be kept, but details of the sender, recipient, time, duration and location would be held. A recent proposal on this from UK and France faced much opposition from telecoms companies and the European Parliament. There will now be a Commission proposal for a directive;
- New measure on data protection: a specific proposal to protect privacy will be issued in parallel with the above data retention proposal.
- European evidence warrant: plans to allow police to seek evidence within other member states were put forward in February this year (see EurActiv 25 Feb) and may now be brought forward.
- Measures to improve police and intelligence systems co-operation.
Other measures
Faull would not be precise about dates but the following measures would be forthcoming – some within weeks, others before the end of the year:
- paper on radicalisation: this will examine the means by which and the reasons why people, especially young men, are being drawn into violent radical groups;
- measures to implement the principle of availability i.e. that all member states should, as and when necessary, have access to all information held by other member states;
- study on the capacities of new member states on combating terrorism;
- revised action plan on terrorism: this is done anyway every six months. The last update was published in June.
Radicalisation
Speculation is rife in the UK that the London bombs were the work of a ‘home-grown’ radical group rather than attackers form outside the UK. This worrying theory, together with a recent UK civil service report, is likely to put the radicalisation issue to the top of the UK Presidency agenda. According to the UK newspaper the Sunday Times, the civil service study shows that an increasing number of disaffected British-born Muslims are turning to extremism. Such potential terrorists are extremely hard to identify as they are not linked to international groups and have no prior record of criminal activity.
Implementation
After the Madrid bombings, it was recognised that member states were not moving quickly enough to implement anti-terrorism measures. Antonio Vitorino (then Justice Commissioner) called for increased efforts and Gijs de Vries was appointed to oversee progress on implementation. Jonathan Faull stressed that the position was now greatly improved: not all measures were wholly in place in all member states - and more could always be done – but largely, measures are being put into action. Member states, even those which had never on their territory suffered a terrorist attack, understood that an attack against any member state was an attack against all and that the threat for all was equally real.
