Sandra Kalniete (EPP, Latvian) presented her draft report on Thursday 12 January, calling for a “coordinated strategy” against foreign interference (see EUROPE 13094/10) to the European Parliament’s special committee on the subject (ING2).
While the report covers ten different chapters, the MEP particularly insisted on the need for the EU to protect its critical infrastructure and its “informational space”. She also called for a “special sanctions regime” to ensure that those who “try to influence our democracies [...] pay unbearably high prices”. Finally, she reiterated her support for the creation of a “permanent committee focusing on hostile information warfare”.
In general, MEPs welcomed the draft report, but recommended that it should include more provisions on ‘Qatargate’ (see EUROPE 13097/2). Bart Groothuis (Renew Europe, Dutch), for example, stressed the importance of the European Parliament having a “fully-fledged counter-intelligence operation and organisation”. Andreas Schieder (S&D, Austrian), on the other hand, argued that an alternative would be for the ING2 committee to be used as “an investigation committee” into corruption cases.
ING2 members also welcomed Ms Kalniete’s proposal to move from a ‘country-agnostic approach’ to a ‘high-risk country approach’.
“It’s a handful of nations giving us a hard time”, Groothuis said, mentioning specifically Russia, China and Iran, whose common points are an “offensive espionage programme”, an obligation for their citizens and businesses “to comply with any request from the state”, including outside their territory, and a “revisionist view of the liberal model”.
“There is not [...] the same type of danger from a fishing company in Norway as from Gazprom”, added Raphaël Glucksmann (S&D, French), saying that one “of the biggest flaws is the political incapacity to formulate a scale of threats”.
Read the report: https://aeur.eu/f/4T1 (Original version in French by Hélène Seynaeve)