MEPs on the Special Committee on foreign interference in the European Union’s democratic processes (INGE) are holding their last committee meeting under the current mandate on Tuesday 15 March. Work will continue in the ‘INGE 2’ Committee, whose creation was approved by MEPs in plenary on Wednesday 9 March (see EUROPE 12908/22).
The work of the next Committee is expected to focus on education, media and understanding the modus operandi of foreign actors in terms of interference.
“Banning the ‘RT’ and ‘Sputnik’ media outlets has not solved the problem, the ecosystem is much larger”, said INGE Committee Chair Raphaël Glucksmann, who also raised the issue of funding from third-country actors such as Gazprom and Huawei.
In addition, future work will also focus on cybersecurity and digital, which are central to this issue. “We have allowed hackers to penetrate our systems, to attack our institutions with extremely weak responses”, said the INGE Committee Chair.
A constitutive meeting of the ‘INGE 2’ Committee is scheduled for 23 and 24 March.
A first report by the INGE Committee, including a number of recommendations to limit foreign interference in the democratic process and disinformation, was approved in plenary on 9 March (see EUROPE 12908/17).
“We wanted to diagnose, measure the extent of the threats and stop them. Our recommendations range from negative measures to restore our deterrence capacity to more positive measures to make our democracies more resilient and stronger”, Mr Glucksmann summarised. (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)