Alongside Migration and Home Affairs Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, probably the last European Commissioner of British nationality, Security Union Commissioner Sir Julian King, unveiled on Wednesday 12 October an overview of his work and announced monthly reports on EU action in the security domain.
King picked out domains where action will be reinforced to reduce the scope for criminals and terrorist groups to take action, and to reduce their resources.
Deradicalisation and the fight against radicalisation are further priorities, as is resilience of European society and critical infrastructure, said King.
He stressed member states’ implementation of decisions that have been taken. The transposition of the European PNR is planned for 2018, but 11 member states do not yet have an implementation plan, King stated – namely Germany, Greece, Poland, Austria, Malta, Hungary, Slovakia, Ireland and Luxembourg. In November, the European Commission will unveil a plan for helping with implementation, along with a plan to release €70 million in 2017-2020 to help achieve this, said Avramopoulos. The Commission will also mobilise €3.8 million for exchange of PNR information between the member states and Europol.
In an initial report published on 12 October, the Commission says agreement will be needed by the end of the year on the draft directive it unveiled on counter-terrorism, upon which the European Parliament and the Council are trying to agree.
In a press release, the Commission says agreement is also needed by the end of the year on revision of the firearms directive. The Commission says it will continue to urge the co-legislators not to water down the aim of a ban on the most dangerous semi-automatic weapons.
On the question of access to precursors that can be used for home-made bombs, the Commission says it has listed new and worrying precursors to be included in the legislation on precursors and will be adding them in November to the list of substances subject to tighter control.
In order to boost the fight against cross-border crime, the Commission’s departments opened proceedings in September against member states that had not yet implemented the Prüm decisions on sharing DNA and digital fingerprints.
The Commission will take measures to ensure the European Centre for the Fight against Terrorism at Europol is able to provide 24/7 support for member states. The high-level working group set up by the Commission in April 2016 to examine the legal, technical and operational aspects of various options needs to speed up its work in order to achieve greater interoperability of information systems. Over the next few months, the Commission will unveil provisional conclusions for the Council and European Parliament.
Finally, in order to boost security at the EU’s external borders, the Commission says it is important to make rapid progress in talks on the adoption by the end of the year of the Commission’s proposal to set up systematic verifications of EU citizens crossing exernal borders, ahead of an EU entry/exit system. Neither the Council nor the European Parliament has yet decided on a negotiating position on such a system. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)