‘Civil liberties at risk from knee-jerk summit reaction’

Date: 25/03/04

By David Cronin

BASIC civil liberties could be at risk from the package of anti-terrorism measures due to be rubber-stamped by EU leaders at the Brussels summit, MEPs from across the left-right divide have warned.

The Madrid bombings a fortnight ago have catapulted the fight against terrorism to the top of the agenda for the gathering of the Union's heads of state and government, which begins today (25 March).

The most symbolic gestures due to be made by the summit are the approval of a solidarity clause for the Union, designed to ensure that all member states would come to the aid of any one of them that suffers a major outrage, as well as the appointment of a special anti-terrorism coordinator.

The summit is also due to boost an action plan against terrorism, which many analysts believe will contain proposals relating to crime in general, rather than the specific offence of terrorism, and could ride roughshod over civil liberties. These include:

• A blueprint for the mandatory retention of data from all phone calls, faxes and emails in the Union;
• the establishment of a central European register of convictions;
• the inclusion of fingerprints on passports and national ID cards in member states, and;
• the collection of data of air passengers and its storage on a database.

Dutch Liberal Johanna Boogerd-Quaak, a vice-chairwoman of the European Parliament's citizen's rights committee, expressed concerns the measures might be too sweeping. “I am very much in favour of combating terrorism and cooperation between intelligence services in the EU and the US,” she said. “But we have to do so with the right means, not by controlling 95% of the people of Europe. That would be exactly what the terrorists want - to create a fear-based society.”

Claude Moraes, a British Labour MEP, queried whether snooping on phone calls and creating huge databases would stop atrocities. “It is entirely understandable that member states want to bang heads together following Madrid. But it is important that, in doing so, they take great care in the heat of the moment to actually tackle terrorism, rather than taking a general swipe at civil liberties.

“The idea of a convictions database is something that blurs the distinction between fighting crime and fighting terrorism.”

Swede Charlotte Cederschiöld, a member of the Parliament's biggest political group, the European People's Party, said: “If we don't watch out, there is a risk we will have a Big Brother society.”

She added that she is not opposed to data retention, in principle. But she believes data should only be retained for a limited period of around six months and that MEPs should be able to monitor the process in the way the US Congress can.

Meanwhile, a new report for the assembly's citizens' rights committee rejects the proposal of having biometric indicators - such as fingerprints and facial images - on passports. Danish deputy Ole Sørensen, who drafted the paper, reckons a European Commission plan to have such information stored in a microchip attached to passports would constitute “an enormous step without proof that it is necessary”.

He advocates that the plan should be rejected by the Parliament, because he does not believe that the current data protection system in the EU is adequate.

Tony Bunyan, editor of civil liberties journal Statewatch, also queried how many of the measures being envisaged at EU level relate to terrorism. “The package for the summit has a great swathe of measures that there has been too little time to debate. The people in Spain didn't vote for this [in the 14 March election]. They voted for an open government, that was not lying to them.”

MEPs have warned that anti-terrorism measures due to be rubber-stamped at the European Council in Brussels on 25-26 March 2004 could infringe basic civil liberties.

• Primary Source

http://consilium.europa.eu/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/en/ec/79696.pdf http://consilium.europa.eu/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/en/ec/79696.pdf

---