At the annual counter-terrorism hosted by Eurojust on Wednesday 20 June, the justice ministers of France, Germany, Spain and Belgium signed a common declaration calling for the creation of the European judicial counter terrorism register under the aegis of the agency.
The four member states, which have been particularly affected by terrorist threats, argue that it is necessary to improve the availability and sharing of information. Creating the register would bring together at European level all information on investigations underway and sentencing for terrorist acts in the European Union.
The ministers feel that Eurojust is the best institution to bring together this legal information.
The initiative is based on the objective of the 2005 decision on the exchange of information (2005/671/JHA), which is still not fully applied by all member states.
“The idea is not to sweep away what has already been done, we need to be reformers, we need to make this unit [file processing centre: Ed] more effective”, said Frédéric Baab, chair of the counter-terrorism group and member of the French bureau of Eurojust.
Baab and other experts in the field welcomed the ministers' declaration at a press conference following the seminar. He described it as a very strong initiative, which will make it possible to connect information, cross-check details and return the information to the judicial authorities of the member states.
François Molins, President of the Public Prosecutor's Office of Paris and counter-terrorism expert, also welcomed the initiative. He takes the view that sharing information allows coordination to take place further upstream, so that problems can be anticipated and objectives distributed. “All of this, I feel, goes in the right direction and should allow judicial actors to work more intelligently”, he said.
The Belgian Federal Public prosecutor, Frédéric Van Leeuw, shares Molins' views, as does Jean-Claude Juncker's adviser, Joëlle Milquet, who could “only welcome the announcement”. (Original version in French by Carmen Garcia, intern)