EU STAND ON NEW ANTI-TERRORIST MEASURES

EU officials are holding discussions to allow government security services to trade information on travellers flying between European cities. Passport and identity checks are also to be reintroduced within the EU’s passport-free travel zone, according to measures being discussed urgently among governments.

EU ministers are also preparing to press the social media industry – providers such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter – to cooperate in preventing jihadists and terrorists using the internet as recruiting sergeants and propaganda instruments inciting hatred and violence.

But the focus in Europe is on fast-tracking the pooling of air travel data within the EU, known as PNR or passenger name records, meaning that millions of EU citizens could have their personal information stored for years. The Spanish, with French and German support, are also pushing for curbs on passport-free travel within the Schengen area that covers most of the EU, though not Britain and Ireland, by reintroducing national border ID checks, moves previously rejected on the grounds that they will generate huge airport queues.

But the travel data storage is opposed by the European Parliament, while changing the Schengen rules is being resisted by the European Commission.

EU member states already supply PNR data to the Americans under a clutch of bilateral agreements and can introduce their own national travel data systems, as Britain has done.

But there is no pooling of such data between EU countries as the legislation has been blocked by the European Parliament since 2013. Laimdota Straujuma, the Prime Minister of Latvia which has just taken over the rotating presidency of the EU, and Donald Tusk, who chairs EU summits, have demanded an end to the parliament blockade .

The calls for a bigger pan-European crackdown got louder last year with the ascendancy of ISIS in Syria, boosted by an estimated 3,000 Europeans joining its ranks. The total number who have returned to Europe is now estimated to be over 500, including 250 who have returned to the United Kingdom, almost 200 to France and around 70 to Belgium. The Americans are alarmed at the implications of radicalised EU nationals returning home from the Middle East and then using visa-waiver systems between Washington and the EU to board planes to the US.

Eric Holder, the US attorney-general, complain that the Europeans are not doing enough to gain the cooperation of the social media in combatting Islamist violence. The Americans are also demanding that they be allowed to retain travel data supplied by the Europeans for longer than the 10 years currently permitted.

Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister, is insisting that the rules governing the Schengen passport-free zone have to be changed. Dimitris Avramopoulos, the EU commissioner for home affairs, has resisted the demands from Spain and France for changes to the Schengen travel regime, pointing out that there is already scope for temporary introduction of document checks and the re-erection of national border controls if a government invokes emergency conditions.

Officials involved in the discussions also say that the value of the computer data bases underpinning the Schengen system is impaired by the reluctance of national intelligence services, not least the British, to feed in information. The national services are sometimes happy to share intelligence with other countries, but loth to input the information into a pooled data base.

Cazeneuve also called for the European PNR regime. That view was dismissed by Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Greens MEP specialising in data protection.

The British are the hawks on the counter-terrorism crackdown and strong supporters of the European PNR system, having previously also called for data collection on rail and ferry travellers. Following the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005, the British shaped an EU data retention directive, adopted the following year, allowing the capture and storage of electronic communications. But last April the European Court of Justice struck down the directive as in breach of the EU’s charter of fundamental rights. That ruling means the collection and retention of travel data may also fall foul of the court.