EU justice ministers meeting in Brussels have agreed a suite of measures to step up security in the wake of the Paris attacks, although they have stopped short of creating an EU-wide intelligence agency.
Ministers agreed to speed up the adoption of passenger name record legislation by the end of the year. This will facilitate greater pooling of information on air travellers and ensure closer checks of EU citizens re-entering the EU through its external borders.
Officials were due to meet representatives of the European Parliament yesterday evening to discuss the acceleration of the legislation, amid residual resistance from some members of the parliament to aspects of the proposal due to concerns about data privacy.
However, while ministers agreed to increase the sharing of information on so-called foreign fighters, a proposal by EU home affairs commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos to set up a European intelligence agency was not endorsed.
"A European intelligence service is something that would take a lot of time, while the fight against terrorism is something to do immediately," France's interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said after the meeting, stressing that the priority was to step up exchanges of information among national intelligence services, rather than setting up a joint agency.
Members of the European Parliament have been leading calls for the establishment of a pan-European intelligence agency, which they believe is vital to ensure the security of citizens across the travel area. Guy Verhofstadt, the head of the EU Liberal group Alde, said that recent events had shown the need for a European intelligence agency. "Current methods of co-operation between national security and intelligence agencies have failed," he said. "We need a European system that can ensure the mandatory exchange of information regarding terrorist threats."
However, with a number of member states opposed to sharing sensitive national intelligence information with all other members, the focus was on encouraging member states to share information bilaterally.
Arriving in Brussels for the meeting, Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald said Ireland stood in solidarity with France following the terrorist attacks that left at least 130 dead.
“We have a long experience in Ireland of terrorism,” she said. “We’ve had to fight terrorism over many decades and our police services worked very effectively to do just that . . . The first duty of any government is to protect the lives of their citizens. We understand what terrorism can do to a country.”
Yesterday's emergency meeting was convened in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13th, which revealed the existence of the terrorist jihadist cell inside France and Belgium that masterminded the attacks. The realisation that a number of terrorist suspects who were known to authorities travelled within and outside the EU without being apprehended by police has sparked concern about security standards.
While the EU’s Schengen rules state that all non-EU nationals must be checked on entering the EU, only minimal checks are required for EU citizens. Following the revelation that most of the perpetrators of the Paris attacks were EU citizens, ministers yesterday agreed to adopt more stringent checks of EU citizens, including identity checks of EU passport holders entering the EU against criminal and security databases. Individual states, though, will retain significant power over the level and frequency of these checks.
After the meeting, Ms Fitzgerald said Ireland would participate in the Schengen Information System (SIS) database, which alerts authorities to potential terrorist suspects, adding that the Garda Síochána already made use of existing databases, including those of Interpol, Europol and other organisations.
Ministers also agreed to clamp down on the availability of semi-automatic weapons in the Schengen area, with the European Commission due to introduce an amended EU firearms directive.
