The European Commission adopted, on Wednesday 30 September, a report assessing the measures taken by Member States to comply with EU rules on combating terrorism (Directive 2017/541). It gives a mixed review.
It thus considers that this directive has made it possible to “strengthen the rules of criminal justice against terrorism and to give more rights to victims”. In its report it reviews the actions of Member States to clarify and tighten their legislation concerning, for example, the definition of terrorist activities, assistance in the preparation of a terrorist act through recruitment or travel assistance for the preparation of terrorist acts as well as legislation concerning victims and the right to assistance.
Nevertheless, “while the measures taken by the Member States to comply with the Directive are generally satisfactory, there are shortcomings which give cause for concern. For example, not all Member States criminalise in their national law all the offences listed in the Directive as terrorist offences”.
Furthermore, there are gaps in the measures taken by Member States to criminalise terrorist travel and terrorist financing as well as to support victims, it said.
For example, on the subject of travel, it notes that in Germany, “there seems to be no explicit reference to the objective of participation in the activities of a terrorist group”. In Bulgaria, Portugal, Romania and Slovenia, the scope of the infringement seems narrower than in the Directive and Poland does not seem to transpose this provision at all.
Finally, in general, the transposition of this legislation has been laborious: the deadline for transposition expired on 8 September 2018. Seven Member States - France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Slovakia and Sweden - notified the transposition of the Directive on time and two (Finland and the Netherlands) did so shortly afterwards.
The Commission launched infringement procedures on 22 November 2018 against sixteen Member States for failure to notify the adoption of national legislation. By the end of July 2020, fifteen of these sixteen Member States said that transposition was complete and almost all Member States have adopted, at least in part, specific legislation to transpose the Directive.
This was with the notable exception of France and Italy, which considered that their pre-existing legislation was sufficient to meet the objectives of the Directive.
Link to the report: https://bit.ly/30rmyQq (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)