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“The mission of the Marshall Center is to create a more stable security environment by advancing democratic institutions and relationships, especially in the field of defense; promoting active, peaceful security cooperation; and enhancing enduring partnerships among the nations of North America, Europe and Eurasia”.
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“I fully support this French Presidency's initiative to explore the possibilities for improving the exchange of officers during their basic training. I consider it an important contribution to increasing the interoperability of the European armed forces and to providing full knowledge of EU instruments and EU objectives to ensure the comprehensive approach towards crisis management that we want to promote.” Javier Solana
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One of the main issues identified during the study of the Internet as media support and the engineering of the value as a method to develop strategic intelligence effi ciency is the Internet influence on behavior and the rules which conduct the Intelligence working - a complex process of the leading act. The Internet as we know today reconfigures the entire social context of communication in a total different manner; both do to the specific nature of this new environment and to the fastness and unlimited character of the technology development. This fact assures new quantity and quality of the human connectivity. The value engineering– the method of the value analyses – is a part of economical tools, using the functional approach of the products related to the beneficiary demanding. We believe that this tool can be applied also in the fi eld of Military Intelligence with promising results for the future.
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The author of the article puts forward a thesis that the period in the international relations that came after the Cold War has already been completed and we are now in another one, to which he gives the name of the Post-Lisbon order. So far, in the discourse on the international relations it is called the post-Cold War order, without a clear distinction of its timeframe. The author, who presents a theoretical introduction of the definition of the international order which he perceives as a way of determining the relationship between international actors, who also presents the most important provisions of the Treaty of Lisbon and the New NATO Strategic Concept (adopted in Lisbon), called the new period a post-Lisbon order. By analyzing the presented problems the article constitutes an attempt to prove the thesis which was put forward at the beginning.
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Today, western Balkans states are a long way from where they were at the beginning of the decade. The Stabilization and Association process, which has just started in 2000, is almost completed as all the states have negotiated and signed the Stabilization and Association Agreements with the EU, the EU is negotiating visa liberalization agreements and all states are entitled to the new pre-accession financial assistance IPA, designed to address the strategic needs of the region. This progress, apart from the persistent efforts of the national governments and the EU administration, is also partly due to the visionary policy reports and recommendations of people and organizations working on the Balkans. We are convinced that their commitment to the region and the ability to look beyond the limitations of the immediate political context for lasting solutions makes them an irreplaceable item on every reading-list of both those who wish to study the Balkan region and those who aim to produce similar such reports addressing the present dilemmas and challenges for the western Balkan states. “The Enlargement of the EU to Balkans” is a compilation of four reports on the Balkans published since 2000. They all concern the Balkan region and its prospects for the future – away from violent legacies towards peace, stability and European integration. As such, they are a valuable source for all those interested in and studying the recent political developments in this region, for these reports give an overview of the challenges that Balkans states faced on the start of their journey to European integration. We hope this collection of reports will become part of the curricula of schools and departments where Balkan politics, history and EU integration are taught. From the multitude of reports, books and other works written on the Balkans, the reports that follow were not chosen accidentally. Rather, we aimed to include the most influential reports, those which had the greatest impact on the EU and international community’s approach towards the Balkans, those with the most valuable recommendations concerning the features of EU’s policy towards the Balkans. The results of in-depth field research and analysis of diplomatic relations in the region, these reports provided the most credible assistance to the European and other policy-makers when faced with the dilemma ‘how to deal with postconflict post-Milosevic Balkans?’ By publishing their reports again, we also like to pay tribute to those people and organizations that made their most for Balkans to be found in EU integration map.
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The Schengen system has been at the centre of sharp controversy throughout 2011 and the early months of 2012 a rising from attempts by several member state governments to challenge the right to the free movement of persons and the abolition of internal border checks. The speech delivered by Nicolas Sarkozy early this month (March 2012), as part of the French presidential campaign, in which he threatened to suspend France’s participation in Schengen illustrates this phenomenon. This paper examines the European Commission’s response to the Schengen controversies, namely the Schengen Goverance Package publishedin September 2011 and currently under negotiation in Council and the European Parliament. It assesses the scope and added value of the Package’s two new legislative proposals (a new Schengen evaluation mechanism and revised rules for restating internal border checks) by looking at the origins and features ofthe debate surrounding liberty of circulation in the Schengen area.
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Regulatory agencies such as Europol, Frontex, Eurojust, CEPOL as well as bodies such as OLAF, have over the past decade become increasingly active within the institutional architecture constituting the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice and are now placed at the forefront of implementing and developing the EU’s internal security model. A prominent feature of agency activity is the large-scale proliferation of‘knowledge’ on security threats via the production of policy tools such as threat assessments, risk analyses, periodic and situation reports. These instruments now play a critical role in providing the evidence-base that supports EU policy making,with agency-generated ‘knowledge’ feeding political priority settingand decision-making within the EU’s new Internal Security Strategy (ISS).
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EU-Russia cooperation in the framework of the Common Space on Freedom, Security and Justice, launched almost a decade ago in 2003, has borne fruit more in the security aspects than the justice and liberty-related policy areas. This study assesses the uneven cooperation onjustice and home affairs between the EU and Russia, while delving into the intersection between cooperation on justice, liberty and security and the promotion of human rights, democracy and rule of law in EU-Russia relations. The study concludes by proposing a set of policy recommendations to the LIBE Committee for playing a more active role in this important field of cooperation between the EU and Russia.
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In July 2011, the European Commission published a Communication aimed at setting out different options for establishing a European terrorist finance tracking system (TFTS). The Communication followed the adoption of the EU-US agreement on the US Terrorist Finance TrackingProgram (TFTP) in 2010. The agreement concluded various series of national, European and transatlantic negotiations after the disclosure through public media of the US TFTP in 2006. This paper takes stock of the wide range of controversies surrounding this security-focused programme with dataveillance capabilities. After stressing the impact of the US TFTP on international relations, the paper argues that the EU-US agreement primarily has the effect of shifting in formation-sharing practices from the justice/judicial/penal/criminal investigation framework into the security/intelligence/administrative/prevention context as the main rationale. The paper then questions the TFTP-related conception of mass intelligence through large-scale databases and transnational communication of bulk data in the name of targeted surveillance. Following an examination of the project creating an EU system equivalent to the TFTP, the paper emphasises the fundamental paradox of transatlantic security matters, in which European criticisms of American programmes tend to be ultimately translated into EU imitation of US dataveillance practices.
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In the wake of the disclosures surrounding PRISM and other US surveillance programmes, this paper assesses the large-scale surveillance practices by a selection of EU member states: the UK, Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Given the large-scale nature of these practices, which represent a reconfiguration of traditional intelligence gathering, the paper contends that an analysis of European surveillance programmes cannot be reduced to a question of the balance between data protection versus national security, but has to be framed in terms of collective freedoms and democracy. It finds that four of the five EU member states selected for in-depth examination are engaging in some form of large-scale interception and surveillance of communication data, and identifies parallels and discrepancies between these programmes and the NSA-run operations.
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In the last 30 years, a clear trend has come to define modern immigration law and policy. A set of seemingly disparate developments concerning the constant reinforcement of border controls, tightening of conditions of entry, expanding capacities for detention and deportation and the proliferation of criminal sanctions for migration offences, accompanied by an anxiety on the part of the press, public and political establishment regarding migrant criminality can now be seen to form a definitive shift in the European Union towards the so-called ‘criminalisation of migration’. This paper aims to provide an overview of the ‘state-of-the-art’ in the academic literature and EU research on criminalisation of migration in Europe. It analyses three key manifestations of the so called ‘crimmigration’ trend: discursive criminalisation; the use of criminal law for migration management; and immigrant detention, focusing both on developments in domestic legislation of EU member states but also the increasing conflation of mobility, crime and security which has accompanied EU integration.
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This paper examines the challenges facing the EU regarding data retention, particularly in the aftermath of the judgment Digital Rights Ireland by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) of April 2014, which found the Data Retention Directive 2002/58 to be invalid. It first offers a brief historical account of the Data Retention Directive and then moves to a detailed assessment of what the judgment means for determining the lawfulness of data retention from the perspective of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights: what is wrong with the Data Retention Directive and how would it need to be changed to comply with the right to respect for privacy? The paper also looks at the responses to the judgment from the European institutions and elsewhere, and presents a set of policy suggestions to the European institutions on the way forward. It is argued here that one of the main issues underlying the Digital Rights Ireland judgment has been the role of fundamental rights in the EU legal order, and in particular the extent to which the retention of metadata for law enforcement purposes is consistent with EU citizens’ right to respect for privacy and to data protection.
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This study examines the legal and political implications of the recent end of the transitional period for the measures in the fields of police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters, as set out in Protocol 36 to the EU Treaties. This Protocol limits some of the most far-reaching innovations introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon over EU cooperation on Justice and Home Affairs for a period of five years after the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon (until 1 December 2014), and provides the UK with special ‘opt out/opt-in’ possibilities. The study focuses on the meaning of the transitional period for the wider European Criminal Justice area. The most far-reaching change emerging from the end of this transition will be the expansion of the powers if scrutiny by the European Commission and Luxembourg Court of Justice over Member States’ implementation of EU criminal justice law. The possibility offered by Protocol 36 for the UK to opt out and opt back in to pre-Lisbon Treaty instruments poses serious challenges to a common EU area of justice by further institutionalising ‘over-flexible’ participation incriminal justice instruments.
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This study provides a comparative analysis of the national legal regimes and practices governing the use of intelligence information as evidence in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden. It explores notably how national security can be invoked to determine the classification of information and evidence as 'state secrets' in court proceedings and whether such laws and practices are fundamental rights and rule of law-compliant. The study finds that, in the majority of Member States under investigation, the judiciary is significantly hindered in effectively adjudicating justice and guaranteeing the rights of the defence in ‘national security’ cases. The research also illustrates that the very term ‘national security’ is nebulously defined across the Member States analysed, with no national definition meeting legal certainty and “in accordance with the law” standards and a clear risk that the executive and secret services may act arbitrarily.
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This paper examines key developments in the field of European border surveillance in the Mediterranean. By asking,‘Whose Mare?’, we focus on rule of law challenges stemming from these developments in a post-Lisbon EU. The developments examined are the Italian Navy-led Mare Nostrum operation, the debates over European ‘exit strategies’ for this operation and the ensuing launch of the Frontex Triton joint operation (JO). The recently adopted Regulation on Frontex sea border surveillance operations is also presented as a key development to understand the rule of law challenges. Moreover, the adoption of the European Union Maritime Security Strategy (MSS) and the development of several maritime surveillance systems in the EU highlight that a wide range of actors seeks authority over this field.
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This paper examines the EU’s counter-terrorism policies responding to the Paris attacks of 13 November 2015. It argues that these events call for a re-think of the current information-sharing and preventive-justice model guiding the EU’s counter-terrorism tools, along with security agencies such as Europol and Eurojust. Priority should be givento independently evaluating ‘what has worked’ and ‘what has not’ when it comes to police and criminal justice cooperation in the Union. Current EU counter-terrorism policies face two challenges: one is related to their efficiency and other concerns their legality. ‘More data’ without the necessary human resources, more effective cross-border operational cooperation and more trust between the law enforcement authorities of EU member states is not an efficient policy response. Large-scale surveillance and preventive justice techniques are also incompatible with the legal and judicial standards developed by the Court of Justice of the EU.
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Greater cooperation with third countries is one of the EU’s core responses to the refugee crisis. This cooperation is focused on the read mission of individuals irregularly staying in the EU, on border surveillance and control, and on the reception of refugees in third countries. The EU has attempted to co-opt Turkey and African countries into these priorities, using funding and specific mobility channels as incentives. This paper poses the question of what kind of cooperation the EU should pursue with third countries. As the current approaches are not new, we present the lessons from the EU’s long cooperation with Morocco to inform the current debate. We find that, first, the difficult negotiations on an EU Readmission Agreement with Morocco show that more funding or ‘incentives’ cannot guarantee such an agreement, let alone its implementation. Second, we highlight the challenges of the partly EU-funded and Frontex-coordinated cooperation on borders between Spain and Morocco, which hampers the capacity of third countries to respect migrants’ rights and challenges the obligations of EU member states under European and international law. Third, as EU cooperation with Turkey and Africa now aims to ‘stem’ the flow of asylum-seekers, the capacity of third countries to offer reception and protection to asylum-seekers is crucial. We conclude that Morocco has limited capacities in this regard, which raises the question of whether third countries can be assumed to be able to offer such reception and protection.
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This Research Paper examines the costs of non-Europe in the field of organised crime. It provides an interdisciplinary analysis of the main legal/ethical, socio-political and economic costs and benefits of the EU in policies on organised crime. It offers an in-depth examination of the transformative contribution that the EU has made, in terms of investigation, prosecution and efficiency, to trans-border operational activities and the protection of its citizens’ rights. Finally, it seeks to answer the questions of what are the costs and benefits of European cooperation and what forms of cooperation would bring more European added value.
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In this project, we have tried to implement some practices which will guide our future activities as the ECFR takes its work into new policy areas. First, we have tried to look at several dimensions of European power. We have explored how Moscow sees the EU and uses its power to influence it; how each member state relates to Russia; as well as the links between Moscow and EU institutions. This report draws on data gathered by a team of researchers from all 27 EU member states. Each conducted a survey of their country’s economic, political and military relations with Russia. Secondly, we have tried to avoid the euphemistic phrases and diplomatic practices that cloak tensions within the EU and between the EU and third countries. In order to promote a common European approach, we have illustrated some of the areas where the policies of individual member states have undercut common European objectives. The goal is not to stigmatise particular countries. Future reports on European foreign policy issues will put the spotlight on the policies of other states. Thirdly, we have done our best to understand the issues from the perspective of policymakers. A senior EU official complained to one of the authors about the propensity of outside observers to simplify complex issues and to imply that the only thing standing in the way of a successful EU foreign policy is the stupidity of officials. We have tried to heed this plea and have not offered any easy, ready-made solutions. We are grateful to the many officials who have provided us with useful guidance at every step of the research process, in particular those who took part in a round-table discussion of the interim findings, attended by officials from all EU institutions and a majority of EU member states.
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