UK Home Secretary Pushes Need For Security In Brussels

by Ulrika Lomas, for LawAndTax-News.com, Brussels

19 July 2005

UK Home Secretary Charles Clarke and the EU's Interior Ministers' Council agreed last week that 'Security must take priority over rights; but MEPs served notice on Mr Clarke that "You have our support but you will not get blind obedience".

"We agreed, I think, a very strong statement to say that all of us across the European Union are absolutely determined to accelerate our work to make terrorism more difficult," said British Home Secretary Charles Clarke after the Council meeting. "It focuses around a wide range of different exchanges of data and information, whether on stolen explosives or communications data or operational cooperation between different forces," he said.

"We are saying today that we have to do better," he said, after a three-hour extraordinary session that was called in the wake of the London bombings. The Council announced its commitment to improving police cooperation and information sharing, finding out what makes people turn to terror, and reviewing shipping and aviation security. The Ministers pledged to agree common standards for security features and procedures for issuing identity cards, as well as rules to combat terror financing.

Clarke said that a new balance had to be found between protecting individual freedoms and protecting society as a whole. "The human right to travel on the Underground in London on a Thursday morning without being blown up is an important human right to set alongside with all the human rights with which we have to deal," he said. "The question of civil liberties has to be treated in a proportionate way." With police expressing fears of further attacks in Britain, Clarke urged his EU counterparts to use the momentum to ensure swift passage of the laws. "What we have to do is accelerate and speed up our work to agreement, to ensure that we put in place, in practice, the measures which are needed to make the work of terrorism more difficult," he said.

Later, addressing the European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee to present the programme of the UK presidency, Mr Clarke gave support to moves to speed up draft EU legislation to allow data retention from phone calls and emails to help fight terrorism, a plan rejected by MEPs in June when they sent the proposal back to the parliamentary committee for further debate.

The original proposal to store data from phone calls, text messages and emails for a maximum of three years was put forward by the UK, Ireland, France and Sweden. The stored information would only include details on the date, time and location of the communication but not on the content of the conversation.

To give an example of how important intelligence agencies and the use of new technologies are, Mr Clarke mentioned that the presence of CCTV cameras on public transport in London would certainly help investigators to identify the terrorists. "The support that we had from international, and particularly European, intelligence agencies and police has been first class," Mr Clarke told the committee. "It has made a material difference".

Parliament's rapporteur on data protection, Alexander ALVARO (ALDE, DE), who asked MEPs in June to reject the proposal to store data from phone calls and emails, told Mr Clarke: "You have our support but you will not get blind obedience. I find very annoying the rhetorical way people use to explain how to fight terrorism. (...) You argue that intelligence units are the best weapons but they failed in New York, Madrid and London". Many MEPs insisted that Member States must justify the data retention measures. Kathalijne Maria BUITENWEG (Greens/EFA, NL) said "Privacy is not something holy but it is up to us to prove a measure is necessary".

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