On Sunday 15 January in an interview with the Belgian newspaper, Le Soir, the head of the EPP group in Parliament, Manfred Weber, from Germany, called for a committee of enquiry to be set up in Parliament on the terrorist attacks that occurred in Paris, Brussels and more recently in Berlin.
The aim of this commission will be to shed light on the possible shortcomings in cooperation between the national authorities and the European police office, Europol. The attacks that have rocked the EU over recent months, “all had a transnational dimension: the terrorists either came from other member states all had connections and support”, explained the German MEP.
This committee’s mandate still needs to be negotiated with the other political group, explained the EPP leader but that it was not expected, at this stage, to focus on anything other than breaches of European law.
At the end of 2016, the European Commission presented a raft of new initiatives to tackle terrorism, such as the strengthening of the Schengen Information System (SIS), which includes a mechanism for flagging up new categories of alert.
According to one European source, systematic external EU border controls have also begun to prove productive and allowed for 50,000 people to be refused entry to the Schengen area in 2016 at the French airport of Roissy alone. The European PNR system, however, remains cumbersome and difficult to implement for many different member states. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)