Table of Contents
Protecting the security of their citizens is one of the core functions and reasons of being of the modern nation state. In a system like the European Union (EU), where the constituent member states retain full national sovereignty over matters of internal security, the role of EU common institutions in this critical domain is far from obvious. When terrorism first afflicted the European Community member states in the 1970s they responded in 1975 by setting up a loose intergovernmental cooperation framework outside of the partly supranational legal and institutional framework of the European Communities (EC) of the time. This so-called TREVI[1] framework remained outside of the EC treaty framework; had no legal base, permanent structures, legislative powers or budget. Nevertheless TREVI was seen at the time as quite successful in that it allowed for information exchange and occasional cross-border coordination of measures. In 1993, as a result of the Maastricht Treaty (the Treaty on European Union or TEU),[2] TREVI was incorporated into the EU as part of the provision on Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) cooperation in the context of the new third pillar, Title VI of the TEU. Inclusion of TREVI in the third pillar brought cooperation against terrorism for the first time within the ambit of the EU Treaties and institutions. Yet the absence of any defined objectives and of any external action competence, the inadequate legal instruments provided for by the Maastricht Treaty, and institutional provisions that retained much of the intergovernmental nature of the previous TREVI cooperation made the third pillar an only marginally more effective framework for anti‑terrorism cooperation.
The situation changed substantially with the reforms introduced by the Treaty of Amsterdam [3] in 1999. Under the overarching fundamental treaty objective of maintaining and developing the Union as an ‘area of freedom, security and justice’[4] (‘AFSJ’) the EU was for the first time vested with an explicit internal security mandate: Article 29 TEU establishes the objective of providing citizens with a ‘high level of safety’ within the AFSJ and Article 61(e) of the Treaty Establishing the European Community (TEC)[5] links police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters to the aim of ‘a high level of security by preventing and combating crime within the European Union’. Related to the new objectives were a number of other important reforms such as:
the introduction of more appropriate legal instruments for the third pillar;[6]
the incorporation of the until then ‘exiled’ Schengen system[7] with its considerable array of law enforcement cooperation mechanisms;
the ‘communitarisation’, that is, transfer into the more supranational part of the Treaties, of part of the JHA areas in the context of a new Title IV TEC (which includes border controls as one area of obvious relevance to the fight against terrorism); and
the creation of an external treaty-making competence of the EU/EC in the JHA domain.[8]
To these reforms one has to add a changed political context at the end of the 1990s. While still asserting their full sovereignty in matters of internal security, member states were at least willing to fill the notion of the AFSJ with some substance through a deepening of their cooperation on a broad range of internal security-related matters. This political will is demonstrated by the Conclusions of the Tampere European Council of October 1999 with, inter alia, their emphasis on developing judicial cooperation in criminal matters and the decision to establish the cross-border prosecution unit Eurojust.
When the attacks of 11 September 2001 (9/11) brutally inaugurated a new phase of terrorism, the EU was therefore in a better position than ever before to develop a common response to the challenge. Since then the Madrid attacks of March 2004 and the London attacks of July 2005 (as well as foiled major attacks in several member states) have brought this threat much closer to home. The question is therefore how, and how well, the EU has used its improved potential to emerge as an actor in the fight against terrorism. This chapter will try to provide an answer to this question and to bring out both the progress and the problems connected with the Union’s role in this sensitive field.
[*] Professor, Marie Curie Chair of Excellence, Université Robert Schuman de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France, and Director of the European Union-funded SECURINT project on EU internal security governance.
[1] TREVI stood officially for Terrorisme, Radicalisme, Extrémisme et Violence Internationale, but its real background seems to have been a word game linked to the Dutch Minister Fonteijn (in Dutch, ‘fountain’) who chaired the meeting that established TREVI and a dinner the ministers had close to the Trevi Fountain in Rome.
[2] Treaty on European Union, opened for signature 7 February 1992, OJ C 191, (entered into force 1 November 1993) (Maastricht Treaty, hereinafter cited as TEU).
[3] Treaty of Amsterdam amending the Treaty on European Union, the Treaties establishing the European Communities and certain related acts, opened for signature 2 October 1997, OJ C 340, (entered into force 1 May 1999) (Treaty of Amsterdam).
[4] TEU, above n 2, art 2.
[5] Originally the Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community, renamed by the TEU to Treaty Establishing the European Community, opened for signature 25 March 1957, 298 UNTS 11 (entered into force 1 January 1958) (hereinafter cited as TEC), consolidated version published OJ C 321E.
[6] Framework Decisions and Decisions were added as legislative instruments of the Council, in order to provide alternatives to the cumbersome Conventions subject to national ratification procedures.
[7] Established in 1985 outside of the EC framework by initially only five EC member states through the Schengen Agreement, which provided for the abolition of controls on persons at internal borders and hence forced the countries involved to adopt a whole range of ‘compensatory measures’ to offset potential internal security risks stemming from this step.
[8] TEU art 38 in conjunction with art 24 for the matters of the remaining third pillar (police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters). In the domains of internal Community competence the Community enjoys in accordance with the doctrine of parallelism between the internal and the external competences developed by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) an implied power to act externally as far as such action is necessary for achieving objectives under the TEC. As a result the Community has gained ‘automatically’ external action capabilities in the JHA areas communitarised as a result of the 1999 reforms.