Luxembourg, 09/10/2014 (Agence Europe) - One of the first measures agreed on Thursday morning 9 October in Luxembourg by EU ministers for home affairs at the end of a discussion lasting several hours on the subject of “foreign combatants”, was to convince the European Parliament to resume the PNR dossier and examine a possible amendment to the Schengen Border Code, as a means to optimise controls of European travellers coming back from sensitive areas. Three thousand Europeans are currently in Syria and Iraq or have returned or are on the point of leaving for these areas, according to currently available data. This phenomenon is all the more worrying because certain Europeans have already resorted to terrorist action on European soil, such as the French citizen, Mehdi Nemmouche, who killed four people on 24 May last at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.
European ministers believe that, “foreign combatants who go to Syria and Iraq in large numbers constitute a serious threat to the security of the EU and its member states, as well as the security of the region”. It is to this end that on Thursday 9 October, they called on the European Commission to begin exploring ways of amending the Schengen Border Code. Initially, they hope that the Commission will assess the existing legislative framework and tell them whether current instruments are sufficient for improving European security. Secondly, if this analysis reveals shortcomings, ministers will call on the Commission to possibly amend the Schengen Border Code. This approach could perhaps take two years to be adopted but would be very simple: it would involve removing the mention of only, “non-systematic controls” that can be operated at the EU's external borders for European nationals. By getting rid of this reference, member states would have more leeway to control individual nationals returning from so-called risk areas and cross reference their data with existing police databases. One source at the Council explained on Thursday that member states could therefore, “control everyone or no-one” but that they would not be, “obliged to carry out non-systematic controls”. More precisely, this would involve carrying out checks during EU external border controls to see whether the people in question are not the subject of a Schengen Information System (SIS) alert. Criteria, however, will have to be set out, particularly with Frontex and European intelligence services, in an effort to define these new kinds of controls.
Another important demand from European ministers involves the European PNR project, which is still blocked at the European Council. At the end of August, the European Council again underlined in its conclusions the importance of developing this tool by the end of 2014. The European PNR project was presented in February 2012 by the European Commission and seeks to enable European airlines to take personal information from their passengers and deliver it to the law enforcement agencies for a specific time period so that they can check whether certain passengers are already known on particular police databases. This anti-terrorist project stalled at the European Parliament in 2013. The latter believes that it lacks balance on the issue of individual freedoms. Since then, the European Court of Justice has also invalidated the “data retention” directive and the European Parliament is currently involved in setting up the new Juncker Commission. Certain observers therefore believe respecting the 2014 deadline will be very difficult.
Will these measures be sufficient to mitigate the threat? Although on Thursday the Italian minister, Angelino Alfano, mentioned setting up a special team of Internet investigators and experts at Europol, who would be in charge of fighting against jihadists, these measures must be considered more as a complement to other mechanisms that have been implemented in member states, particularly those aimed at preventing radicalisation on the Internet. On Wednesday evening, the Swedish Commissioner, Cecilia Malmström, held a meeting in Luxembourg with representatives from Google, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft to discuss this question. Arriving in Luxembourg on Thursday morning, the Commissioner said that, “this was a first informal meeting” and no decision had been taken. She also said that it was more about the companies explaining what kind of action they would take, such as, for example, preventing the broadcast of decapitations. The meeting, however, did not focus at all on, “blocking Internet sites” that were calling on people to go and fight in terrorist organisations in Syria and Iraq or decisions that went in this direction. Some member states have decided to do this, such as France, very recently but no project of this kind has been discussed at a European level. Malmström warned, “We must avoid rushing into making laws”. (SP)