Debate: Preparation of the European Council meeting of - June  – Relaunch of the Malta Declaration and the use of an effective solidarity mechanism
Date: WEDNESDAY, 23 JUNE 2021
Speaker: Jeroen Lenaers
Political group: PPE
Country: France
Language: EN

What is also shameful, however, is the approach of UEFA in this regard. Previously celebrating the rainbow colours as a symbol of inclusion, it is now trying to ban them as something of a political symbol. This is not about politics, it is about equality, it is about inclusion, and it is about fundamental rights. We need to fight for these fundamental rights every day, and we also expect you in the Council to do that in the coming weeks. UEFA should also celebrate these fundamental values. On the EU Council, the corona pandemic has of course pushed many important topics – rightly so – into the background in the past 18 months, but at the same time, some of these topics are really important and we need to give them the focus they deserve. One of the issues that I would like to talk about today is security, because the EU continues to face a constantly changing security landscape, which is terrorism, organised crime, the drugs trade, human trafficking, and even worse, we see many of these threats developing very strongly, especially in the time of the corona pandemic. Cyber criminality is on the rise. Citizens are more susceptible to violent extremist discourses online. We see more child abuse and child pornography online, and we have a duty to protect both the physical and digital environments. Member States cannot address these challenges effectively on their own. Today’s criminals and terrorists are highly mobile and they make use of the latest state—of—the—art technology, and actually abuse the very freedoms that the single market provides to all of us. We just have to look at the international police Operation Trojan Shield against organised crime two weeks ago to have a terrifying look into the dimension of cross-border criminality. We need to address this effectively, also at the European level. Not only do we need a health union in Europe, but we also need a real security union. We need to build the tools, the infrastructure and the environment in which national authorities can and will work together effectively to tackle these shared challenges. And of course we have Europol at the heart of our cooperation, and we are very supportive of Europol. It is doing an amazing job with the competences that it currently has, but if we really want to address these challenges in the future, we also need to increase the competences of Europol. We need to increase them in at least four fields. First, cyber criminality: in the past four years, cyber criminality has increased tenfold. We need to do more to avoid these developments continuing in the next four years. On counter-terrorism, we need a more coordinated exchange of information to stop allowing highly mobile perpetrators to find loopholes in our Member States’ tracing systems. We need more resources and technical innovation. Just as an example, for the 2015 Paris and Brussels attacks, the Europol task force had to analyse 19 terabytes of information. To give an idea, this is the equivalent of 500 million pages of paper. Thirdly, we need to fight intra—EU cross-border tax fraud, tax evasion and tax avoidance, and fourthly, we need to really start combating industrial espionage. We don’t know exactly what the economic damage is and I think we only have underestimates but, even underestimating it, it has already lost us EUR 60 billion in economic growth in the EU and a potential job loss of 289 000 jobs. One in five European companies suffers from industrial espionage and we need to work harder to help these companies, especially in the period of recovery which we are about to enter. To conclude, in order to guarantee Europe as an area of freedom, security and justice, and in order to defend our European way of life, we need to beef up the competences of Europol, we need to give security the focus it deserves, and we really need to turn Europol into a European equivalent of the FBI.