November 29, 2002	Friday	Ramazan 23, 1423

PARIS: France and Germany have recently chosen to become again the “mainspring” of the European Union, using their joint clout to prod the EU into a more activist role on a number of issues, with the most recent manifestation pertaining to matters of security.

Although the two countries say they will not interfere in the “internal” security situations of the EU’s 15 member countries, President Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder have recently persuaded the EU countries to accelerate their cooperation in the sphere of justice and police matters, an issue in which the EU had considerably lost interest in recent months, effectively putting it on the back burner.

But, in a joint intervention filed in recent days with the offices in Brussels of Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the president of the “convention” that is presently drafting a constitution for the EU, the countries’ two foreign ministers — Dominique de Villepin and Joschka Fischer — have indicated that France and Germany want for the EU to go much further than heretofore envisioned with regard to questions of the member nations’ policies on security, justice and police matters especially as they concern the EU’s position on anti-terrorism.

For example, in the jointly-authored document filed with Giscard d’Estaing, the two men have proposed that in order to get things moving faster and allow the EU to be able to take decisions more rapidly than at present, the EU should be allowed henceforth to decide on the basis of the “qualified majority” of its member nations, and no longer on the sacrosanct basis of an often hard-to-find unanimity.

And one of the first areas where the streamlined decision-making process should apply is that of justice, with the EU creating a Pan-European justice ministry which would have the power to undertake investigations, notably in conjunction with Europol, the joint European police force that presently exists effectively in an embryonic form.

Europol, which is based at The Hague, would, in turn, also be accorded exceptional powers, in any case would be given more autonomy than it possesses at present where its powers are largely dependent on the whims and fancies of the police authorities of the EU’s member states.

And, in order to bring this about, the criminal codes of the EU countries would be harmonized, according to the document filed by Messrs de Villepin and Fischer, in such a way that all the countries would eventually have the same criminal statutes, indeed would establish a list of those crimes — notably with regard to terrorism and the Internet — which would be the special domain of Europol.

But, as if to placate the susceptibilities with regard to the existing criminal laws of the EU’s member countries, the jointly-authored document does emphasize that in no way would the new Pan-European Internal Security authority be established in such a way that it would impinge on the autonomy of the internal security organisms already extant in the member states.

But then, terrorism and cyber-crime being largely transnational phenomena, the Franco-German security initiative would certainly effectively supercede existing national authorities that would certainly be obliged to refer their initiatives to The Hague, where Europol, it is feared, would take on the role of a Big Brother looking perpetually over the shoulder of the national security institutions of the 15 member countries.

The data bank — codenamed Eurodac — will, according to Sarkozy’s announcement, contain notably the fingerprints of persons who apply for political asylum in the EU countries. Sarkozy has said that a circular defining the system and setting the date for its introduction should be published imminently.

Largely the brainchild of the French Interior Minister, and the country’s number one police chief, Eurodac’s principal purpose — outside of being potentially a tremendous weapon in the EU’s war on the international terrorists whom it says flourish on its soil — is to not allow the entry into one European country of an asylum-seeker who has been turned down in another. Indeed, it will attempt to dissuade seekers from filing simultaneously requests for political asylum in several EU countries.