Civil liberties across Europe are under threat from electronic surveillance, undercover operations, and tough anti-terror laws put in place after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, according to an official EU report compiled by independent experts.
The document, which singles out the UK in several areas, criticizes the rush to implement anti-terrorism legislation and argues that it may not be proportionate to the threat.
Compiled by independent experts in all the EU member states, the report says that anti-terrorist measures can “result in interference with private life or with the secrecy of communications, due to increased possibilities of using undercover agents,” restrict the rights of defendants, and lead to “exceptional forms of detention.”
It also says specifically that legislation that gave the British government the power to extend arrest and detention powers over foreign nationals may not be consistent with the UK’s international obligations.
The network of experts was set up in October 2002 by the European Commission at the request of MEPs.
Their first annual report says that undercover work by security services has increased, adding that “states have tended to infiltrate terrorist organization and increasingly used special methods of investigation such as infiltration by agents, monitoring and interception communications.
Such methods constitute a “potential threat to privacy,” particularly when they are deployed before any offense has taken place.
The experts are also concerned about the imprecise definition of terrorist offenses, which are used to justify “special methods of inquiry” resulting in a “major interference in private life.”
And their dossier expresses deep concern over increased collaboration with the US on security issues.
“There are doubts at this time,” says the document, “as to whether the protection offered by the US is adequate.”
Several areas of transatlantic cooperation are cited, including the passage of information from Europol, which coordinates among EU police forces.
“The absence of an independent control authority competent for supervising the transmission of data by Europol and the uses made of this data by the US authorities is grounds for particular concern,” the document says.
Meanwhile a deal to give the US authorities certain information about air passengers traveling to America is also criticized. There is, the experts say, real risk of infringement of “various guarantees.”
Tony Bunyan, editor of Statewatch magazine which monitors civil liberties, said: “The report says that responses to terrorist must be kept a strict minimum, be temporary and be targeted in a way that does not affect other categories of people. Yet the response of EU governments has been to propose measures which place the population, or sections of it under wholesale surveillance.”
The independent experts’ report also highlights moves, favored in particular by the German authorities, to create terrorist profiles, targeting groups of individual thought to be more likely to warrant attention.
They say that such a system “can only be accepted in the presence of a fair, statistically significant demonstration of the correlation between these characteristics and the risk of terrorists, a demonstration that has not been made at this time.”
Groups targeted are likely to suffer “serious violation of their right of presumption of innocence,” it concludes.
Overall the document concludes that: “Independent control mechanisms must be provided against possible abuse committed by the executive or by criminal prosecution authorities. In addition, restrictions imposed on individual freedoms in response to the terrorist threat must be limited to what is strictly necessary.”
Arab News Opinion 7 May 2003
