Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-02-10-Speech-3-513"
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"en.20100210.29.3-513"2
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"Mr President, this is the Commission’s new dual approach. As the former debate showed, now that we have the Lisbon Treaty, work at EU level now enters into a new phase. I am very happy and honoured that I will work together with you in the fight against terrorism and on other security-related matters. We will do this while, of course, fully respecting that it is the Member States who have the final responsibility for all operational and intelligence work in this field.
The EU action plan for enhancing the security of explosives foresees important measures to raise the threshold for terrorists who want to use explosives for an attack. I would propose a legislative framework to address the dangers associated with precursors which can be used to fabricate improvised explosive devices. I will do so this year.
We also have the CBRN action plan proposed by the Commission last June and agreed by the Council. This Action Plan consists of 130 measures. The Commission has earmarked up to EUR 100 million which could be made available from its existing financial programmes to facilitate implementation.
I am fully committed to ensuring that, in the coming years, the European Commission will continue to develop its role as facilitator and catalyst for cooperation, expert networks, exchanging best practices, pooling resources, improving research and developing common approaches to transnational challenges. We will also have to revise how we use our financial resources. This might be by creating an internal security fund, which is foreseen in the Stockholm Programme.
On a large scale, international information exchange concerning the collection of data and storage of data concerning thousands of citizens has to take account – and this was very visible in the last debate we had – of very high data protection standards in order to prevent abuse and mishandling. We also have to make sure, as Commissioner Kallas said, that we connect the dots in an appropriate way. Together with my colleague, Viviane Reding, I will submit in the near future a combined data protection regime that would also cover police and judicial cooperation.
All this will be considered in the evaluation and it will be under the umbrella of the internal security strategy that we will put forward to you within a short time.
Finally, let me conclude by underlining that, in the long run, we can only succeed in fighting against terrorism if we remain able to communicate our values and remain respectful of fundamental rights. We have to avoid our policies being perceived as ambiguous or as applying double standards. We can only defend high moral ground and prevent alienation from our societies and our way of living if we remain faithful to our values of democracy and the rule of law.
I would like to recall to you – some of you were at my hearing a few weeks ago – that I made a promise that I would do an evaluation of all counter-terrorism policies. As a first step, I have asked my services to prepare an overview and an assessment of everything that has been achieved so far. This will be the basis upon which I will decide how to move forward. We need to evaluate and to get a full understanding of what we have, its effects, what is possibly missing and what is overlapping in order to be able to propose new measures and more thought through measures. I look forward to bringing this evaluation to you and to discussing it with you.
But this stocktaking does not mean that I am not fully aware of the fact that the threat of terrorism has not diminished. As my colleague, Mr Kallas, and the Council Presidency have said, we know that terrorism is still one of the greatest threats to our values and to our democracies. The Denver flight showed that recently.
We have statistics from Europol showing that in 2008, EU Member States reported a total of 515 failed or successfully perpetrated terrorist attacks within Europe; 359 individuals were tried on terrorist charges in a total of 187 proceedings; 50% of these were related to al-Qaeda or Islamist terrorism, and 39% to separatist terrorism, such as ETA activities in Spain. We also know that in 2008, we had the tragic events and the horrible bombing in Mumbai, which also targeted European citizens, among them Members of this House. These events and the figures from Europol speak a clear language: terrorism is still there, and it is important that we do not lower our guard and we ensure that all tools are deployed in the fight against terrorism, while of course always fully respecting fundamental rights.
If we look at the instruments that we do have today, we have the EU counter-terrorism strategy, developed after the attacks in Madrid and in London. This strategy highlights the EU’s commitment to combating terrorism globally while respecting human rights and to making Europe safer, allowing its citizens to live in an area of freedom, security and justice. This, of course, is a commitment that it still valid.
There can be no freedom without security and there can be no security without freedom. That is why respecting fundamental rights in the fight against terrorism is not only a requirement of any democratic society but is a necessity in order to ensure that our policies remain credible, legitimate and sustainable. That is why the Commission will only propose measures that will continue to be subject to EU law screening, especially with regard to fundamental rights and rigorous impact assessment, including the impact on personal data and individuals.
Terrorism is, as we know, a global phenomenon, and that is why we will remain dedicated to cooperating with our allies and partners and international organisations all over the world.
Regarding the internal dimension of countering and preventing terrorism, we do have in our counter-terrorist strategy some key objectives on how the Union can contribute in the fight against terrorism. I fully share these objectives, in particular the need to stop violent radicalisation, protect our critical infrastructure, support victims, improve exchange of information between national authorities and cooperate with all appropriate stakeholders. We have to react to non-conventional threats and to improve the detection of threats. We have to deprive terrorists of financial resources and to invest more in research and technological development.
This development on these policies has, of course, been strongly supported by the European Commission in cooperation with the Member States. Over the past year, the Commission has made a major contribution to approximating the legal frameworks of Member States in this work. We have, for instance, the European arrest warrant, which created an EU-wide common understanding on terrorist crime and facilitated extradition procedures within the EU Member States. We have also undertaken important activities to counter the terrorist abuse of the Internet, addressing conditions conducive to terrorist radicalisation, launching a European programme for the protection of critical infrastructure, and limiting access by terrorists to the means they need to commit their acts – funding and explosives."@en1
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