Security considerations should not be at the expense of fundamental rights

Speech by Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP delivered to European Parliament on Tue 7th Jun 2005

Sarah Ludford (ALDE). - Mr President, let me begin by commenting on EU action on justice and home affairs. Criticism of the Hague Programme for placing undue emphasis on security considerations at the expense of respect for fundamental rights is justified. It is not the remark of some left-wing agitator, but a sober assessment by the upper chamber of the British Parliament - the respectable House of Lords.

Of course, threats to our security are threats to our freedom, but the reverse is also true. Undue infringements of our civil liberties make us less secure as individuals. I fully support the work of the last four years to ensure that our law enforcement agencies shed their insular and bureaucratic habits, and that our legal and judicial systems are enabled to interact, so that terrorist suspects cannot slip through the cracks. But in the words of the European data protection supervisors meeting a few weeks ago: "Terrorism is used as a justification for new initiatives, many of which deal with a range of offences, some of which are significantly less serious. It is important to recognise that derogations from fundamental rights that might be justified to tackle terrorism, will not necessarily be justified where other criminal or activity is concerned." They look forward, as I do, to implementation of the suggestion, made by Commissioner Fratini when addressing a meeting of the Joint Supervisory Authorities, that the Commission would consider an a priori assessment of proportionality of any measures to be introduced in future, examining the impact of the proposal on fundamental rights including the question of personal data protection.

Regarding exchange of information, the guiding norm adopted in the Hague Programme is the principle of availability. That is entirely reasonable, as long as it means ending the kind of inexcusable turf wars and jealousies between agencies that prevent cooperation, but clearly it must not be misinterpreted to mean the abandonment of strict controls over retention, transfer and access to personal information.

I am concerned about the potential for profiling people as potential terrorists on the basis of their race, religion or political opinions. The data protection supervisors are firm that the processing of such data should normally be prohibited.

The other area where serious concern exists is in respect of the rights of terrorist suspects. The Council of Europe guidelines on detaining suspects without fair trial have certainly been breached in the United Kingdom and probably in other EU countries. There has been a slide towards relying on evidence extracted under torture and rendition to those countries in breach of the ban on refoulement.

Member States conduct peer review of each other's anti-terrorism and security measures, but they still have not managed to make all Member States even implement the 2002 framework decision on terrorism - the very law which makes it obligatory to criminalise terrorism. While it remains the case that Member States are not implementing their laws, I really find it unacceptable that we should continue to infringe personal liberties.