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BRUSSELS, Dec 12: The European Union’s anti-terrorism drive is causing alarm across the 15-nation bloc, with rights groups and some lawmakers saying tougher laws are being forced through at the expense of civil liberties.
“The authorities are prepared to harmonise repression but not human rights,” Michel Tubiana, president of the Paris-based League of Human Rights, said.
After the September 11 attacks on the United States, the EU and member state governments proposed a welter of legislation in response to the threat of international terrorism.
Measures introduced at EU level include a common definition of terrorism and a pan-European arrest warrant, based on mutual trust in legal systems and aimed at replacing slow, cumbersome extradition procedures between member states.
The chairman of the European Parliament’s justice and home affairs committee, British Liberal Democrat Graham Watson, welcomed agreement on the arrest warrant but also expressed concern over unsatisfactory legal standards in the Union.
“Criminal standards are unsatisfactory in most countries of the Union....We need a parallel programme aimed at raising standards and we need it urgently,” Watson said.
“It would be a shame if European citizens have to serve as test cases, before we realise that we have infringed civil liberties,” he added.
Britain and Spain lobbied hard for an all-encompassing EU warrant as a key step to fight terrorism, but British pressure group Fair Trials Abroad says the warrant “could put any English citizen at the mercy of the other justice systems” in Europe.
Britain is piloting its own anti-terrorism legislation through parliament despite fierce opposition. Critics say the bill has been used as a vehicle for all sorts of repressive measures not relevant to fighting terrorism.
FALSE PRETEXT?: Tubiana told Reuters there was no need for EU anti-terrorism laws since national legislation had gone far enough.
“This pretext of harmonisation is a false pretext,” he said. “In addition, this harmonisation presupposes that all judicial systems function well whereas all one can say with any certainty is that no system functions perfectly.”
Walter Schwimmer, secretary-general of the 43-nation Council of Europe, warned this week: “One of my main concerns is that anti-terrorist action should have a basis in universal values since otherwise it represents a victory for the enemies of those values, those who reject freedom and democracy.”
Amnesty International says its main concern is that the EU’s anti-terrorism drive will harm refugees, because strengthened border controls will prevent them getting to safety inside the bloc. Amnesty is also worried that refugees may be wrongfully accused of being terrorists.
Italian human rights group Sant’Egidio warned that infringing on civil liberties would be giving in to terrorism.
“We are fighting a war on terrorism but if human rights and democratic liberty are attacked then terrorism will have won because it will have already changed our society,” said Mario Marazziti of the Roman Catholic rights group.
“We understand that we need new instruments to fight terror but that doesn’t mean abandoning the core of our democracy.”
Some member states had misgivings about certain elements of the new warrant, but the trauma of September 11 pushed civil liberty concerns aside both at EU and national level.
Germany was wary of relaxing its safeguards on privacy, a key principle of the democratic state founded after World War Two on the ashes of the Nazis’ genocidal police state.
But the revelation that three of the suspected hijackers who carried out the 11 September attacks lived in Germany for years, prompted Interior Minister Otto Schily to draft a bill giving the security services sweeping new powers.
Leading members of the opposition Free Democratic Party accused Schily of trying to “box through [the law] at an intellectual gallop despite misgivings about its legality”.—Reuters
