What is the first image that pops into your head when you hear the word “terrorist”? Does he have a bushy beard and a swarthy complexion? Is he Muslim?
Statistics do not prop up this stereotype. According to Europol, only 0.4% of “terrorist attacks” either carried out or thwarted in the EU between 2006 and 2008 could be attributed to “Islamists”. Most of the 500-per-year such incidents considered by the EU’s police office were the work of “separatist” groups in France and Spain. (The data was collated before the Basque organisation ETA announced a ceasefire in September last year).
If the problem is so confined to pockets of Europe, why do our politicians misrepresent it as a global threat? And why has it become synonymous with Islam, when most of its practitioners in this continent come from a Christian background?
More to the point, what is terrorism? It wasn’t until 2002 that the EU had a collective definition of the concept. Activities deemed as “terrorist” included those with the objective of “seriously intimidating a population” and “seriously destabilising or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a society.”
While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – both supported by all or many EU governments – fulfil all those criteria, the definition had a condition attached. Actions by a state or its army could not be considered as terrorist, it said.
So the official position of the EU is that terrorism is violence by the powerless, not the powerful. Given that the EU’s aversion to violence is so selective, it can be no great surprise that the Union is not only unwilling to tackle the root causes of “terrorism” but is tacitly eager to sustain the problem.
In July 2010, the European Commission issued a paper celebrating the “main achievements” of its “counter-terrorism policy”. Several of the “achievements” listed have little to do with terrorism as it is defined by the EU. These included the introduction of the European arrest warrant, which largely facilitates extradition for offences of a non-political nature. Poland, the top user of the arrest warrant system, has even invoked it in cases of petty theft.
But there is a more sinister side to the story than an effort to claim credit where it is not due. The same paper intimates that the “war on terror” can yield new business opportunities for European firms through “public-private partnerships”. Moreover, it trumpets how €1.7 billion has been allocated to “security” projects between 2007 and 2013 under the EU’s “framework programme” for scientific research. As I document in my book Europe’s Alliance With Israel, many of these research grants involve surveillance equipment that is being tested in illegal settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. (Israel is the main foreign beneficiary of the Union’s research activities).
Later this week the Commission will take new steps to make sure we are all spied on. The EU’s executive is scheduled to approve new measures on the transfer of data for airline passengers flying into the Union. This will be the newest addition to a process initiated not in Europe but in Washington. Following the atrocities of 11 September 2011, George W Bush demanded that the EU hand over details about each person who travels to America.
Like lackeys, our governments and institutions are constantly repackaging the Passenger Name Record (PNR) dossier, despite how it was struck down by the European Court of Justice in 2006. The deficiencies in America’s data protection regime have not been remedied since then. Indeed, Viviane Reding, the EU’s justice commissioner, protested in December about “an apparent lack of interest on the US side to talk seriously about data protection”.
That tantrum aside, Reding has a track record of capitulating to Big Brother when the going gets tough. During 2010, she first expressed misgivings about the bulk transfer of bank account data for European citizens to the US, then gave her blessing to that transfer, after some minor concessions were granted. The concessions did nothing to address how America’s privacy legislation only offers protection against unlawful data processing to US citizens, not to foreigners.
Her colleague Cecilia Malmström, the home affairs commissioner, has a comparable reputation for flip-flopping. When she was a humble MEP in 2005, Malmström spoke eloquently of how liberty should not be sacrificed in the name of security. She opposed another law – it, too, demanded by Bush – forcing phone and internet companies to retain records on each call made or email sent by their customers. Developing extensive systems for such espionage “would be a very major encroachment on privacy, with a high risk of the systems being abused in many ways,” she said, adding: “The fact is that most of us, after all, are not criminals.”
Now that she has been promoted, Malmström has declared the exact same measures as “useful for fighting crime”. She has become so wedded to power that she tramples on the civil liberties she used to defend.
Privacy is recognised as a basic entitlement by the European Convention on Human Rights. This continent’s not-too-distant history should remind us how dangerous it is to deny that right. The former military dictatorship in Greece, for example, used to monitor the population’s political leanings by checking what newspapers they read.
If our politicians want to interfere with privacy, they need solid reasons to do so. The “war on terror” is a lousy excuse.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 30 January – 5 February 2011.
Showing posts with label war on terror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war on terror. Show all posts
Monday, January 31, 2011
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Extradition system wide open to abuse
Robert Hörchner can only sleep for two hours at night before the sweating starts. His wife Annelies wakes up frequently, too; each time she hears a noise outside she opens the curtains, expecting to see police at the front door. The couple are traumatised because Robert spent 10 months locked up in a filthy Polish cell. He has been accused of holding the lease to a property where cannabis was grown but insists that he is innocent.
The ordeal began one evening in April 2007. Hörchner was eating a Chinese meal and sipping wine, when two policemen called to his home in Sint-Michielsgestel, close to the Dutch city of Eindhoven. The officers were courteous and allowed him to finish eating before they brought him to a nearby police station. Yet the only explanation they gave him for the arrest was that he was wanted for extradition by the Polish authorities.
First, he was held for three days in the Netherlands. Then – in October that year – he was flown to Warsaw; upon arrival, he was brought to a detention centre and forced at gunpoint to strip naked by guards with dogs. “They set the dogs on me and let them get really close, then pulled them back,” Hörchner, aged 58, said.
Six days later, he was transferred to a prison in Bydgoszcz, a city in northern Poland where he had previously worked. There were eight or nine others in his cell – all sharing the same toilet - for the duration of his imprisonment. Hygiene was a low priority in the nineteenth century building; each time he returned from the rat-infected exercise yard, he was overcome by the stench of excrement and urine in his cell. He developed a painful rash on his skin; his bedclothes became stained with his own blood. “I survived for only one reason,” he said. “I met a Polish guy in jail, who could speak a little bit of English. He was a parachutist and had done around 400 jumps. He found out that I was also a former parachutist and have done more than 1,000 jumps. His nickname was Grisly. I felt safe with him for the first three months.”
Hörchner had set up a textiles company in partnership with a Polish businessman in 1999. The relationship with that businessman – now in prison himself – was troubled. The businessman borrowed heavily from Hörchner. When Hörchner took steps to end the partnership, the businessman threatened him.
In March 2000, Hörchner’s car was burnt out. He was frightened by this incident and decided to leave Poland. One month later a cannabis plantation was found by the police in a building near Bydgoszcz. During Hörchner’s trial, it was stated that he held the lease for that premises. But when his lawyer eventually obtained the lease document recently – after many years of requesting it - the name of the leaseholder was Roberta Harschnera. Hörchner is adamant that the handwriting on the document is not his, that Harschnera is not an accurate Polish adaptation of his name and that he had never authorised anyone to fill out the document on his behalf. The document also suggests that the lease-holder belonged to a company called Albo but Hörcher says he never worked for a firm of that name.
Hörchner denies strenuously that he leased the building and says that he only visited the premises once - then in the company of his Polish business partner. Hörchner did not actually enter the building, he says, but waited in a car outside until his partner returned from the building.
Hörchner’s extradition took place under the European arrest warrant system. Originally approved by the European Union’s presidents and prime ministers in December 2001, the system was presented as part of an EU “anti-terrorism” package in response to the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 that year. Yet rather than being limited to serious crimes, some EU countries are using it to prosecute a wide variety of offences, many of which are trivial, according to civil liberties watchdogs. Poland, for example, has used the system in the past to seek the extradition of a carpenter who had removed a wardrobe door from a client who refused to pay him.
Data published by EU governments earlier this month shows that Poland issues most cross-border arrest warrants in the 27 country Union. During 2009, Poland issued 4,844 arrest warrants, almost exactly the same number as it did the previous year. The number of Polish warrants was over twice the number issued by Romania and France each: the second and third highest users of the system respectively. Unlike many other EU countries, Polish law requires that all suspected crimes are prosecuted, no matter how inconsequential they may seem.
Catherine Heard, a campaigner with the London-based organisation Fair Trials International, argued that a “proportionality test” should be introduced into the arrest warrant system. That test would allow authorities in one EU state to decide against processing an extradition order from another if it does not regard the alleged offence as sufficiently serious.
“The European arrest warrant was intended to improve cross-border cooperation and standards of justice but in too many cases this new system has resulted in grave injustice,” Heard said. “People are being ripped from their homes and families, to spend months awaiting trial in appalling conditions, to face charges based on the flimsiest of evidence, or to serve a jail sentence imposed after a grossly unfair trial. Vital safeguards must be built into the EU justice system or we will see more cases of injustice.”
Tony Bunyan from Statewatch, a civil liberties group, expressed concern about how a proposed new “European investigation order” would “go even further” than the arrest warrant system. Under the new proposal, authorities from one EU country can seek that individuals in another are placed under surveillance.
As EU governments consider broadening the scope of police and judicial cooperation in the Union, Robert Hörchner vows to keep fighting for a retrial. The arrest warrant system should be fundamentally rethought, he argues, so that it is limited to offences which can be defined as terrorist.
His wife Annelies said that their entire family – the couple have twin daughters, who have recently turned 27 – have suffered enormously. “For us, for our children, it’s a horror story.”
·First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), 24 November 2010
The ordeal began one evening in April 2007. Hörchner was eating a Chinese meal and sipping wine, when two policemen called to his home in Sint-Michielsgestel, close to the Dutch city of Eindhoven. The officers were courteous and allowed him to finish eating before they brought him to a nearby police station. Yet the only explanation they gave him for the arrest was that he was wanted for extradition by the Polish authorities.
First, he was held for three days in the Netherlands. Then – in October that year – he was flown to Warsaw; upon arrival, he was brought to a detention centre and forced at gunpoint to strip naked by guards with dogs. “They set the dogs on me and let them get really close, then pulled them back,” Hörchner, aged 58, said.
Six days later, he was transferred to a prison in Bydgoszcz, a city in northern Poland where he had previously worked. There were eight or nine others in his cell – all sharing the same toilet - for the duration of his imprisonment. Hygiene was a low priority in the nineteenth century building; each time he returned from the rat-infected exercise yard, he was overcome by the stench of excrement and urine in his cell. He developed a painful rash on his skin; his bedclothes became stained with his own blood. “I survived for only one reason,” he said. “I met a Polish guy in jail, who could speak a little bit of English. He was a parachutist and had done around 400 jumps. He found out that I was also a former parachutist and have done more than 1,000 jumps. His nickname was Grisly. I felt safe with him for the first three months.”
Hörchner had set up a textiles company in partnership with a Polish businessman in 1999. The relationship with that businessman – now in prison himself – was troubled. The businessman borrowed heavily from Hörchner. When Hörchner took steps to end the partnership, the businessman threatened him.
In March 2000, Hörchner’s car was burnt out. He was frightened by this incident and decided to leave Poland. One month later a cannabis plantation was found by the police in a building near Bydgoszcz. During Hörchner’s trial, it was stated that he held the lease for that premises. But when his lawyer eventually obtained the lease document recently – after many years of requesting it - the name of the leaseholder was Roberta Harschnera. Hörchner is adamant that the handwriting on the document is not his, that Harschnera is not an accurate Polish adaptation of his name and that he had never authorised anyone to fill out the document on his behalf. The document also suggests that the lease-holder belonged to a company called Albo but Hörcher says he never worked for a firm of that name.
Hörchner denies strenuously that he leased the building and says that he only visited the premises once - then in the company of his Polish business partner. Hörchner did not actually enter the building, he says, but waited in a car outside until his partner returned from the building.
Hörchner’s extradition took place under the European arrest warrant system. Originally approved by the European Union’s presidents and prime ministers in December 2001, the system was presented as part of an EU “anti-terrorism” package in response to the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 that year. Yet rather than being limited to serious crimes, some EU countries are using it to prosecute a wide variety of offences, many of which are trivial, according to civil liberties watchdogs. Poland, for example, has used the system in the past to seek the extradition of a carpenter who had removed a wardrobe door from a client who refused to pay him.
Data published by EU governments earlier this month shows that Poland issues most cross-border arrest warrants in the 27 country Union. During 2009, Poland issued 4,844 arrest warrants, almost exactly the same number as it did the previous year. The number of Polish warrants was over twice the number issued by Romania and France each: the second and third highest users of the system respectively. Unlike many other EU countries, Polish law requires that all suspected crimes are prosecuted, no matter how inconsequential they may seem.
Catherine Heard, a campaigner with the London-based organisation Fair Trials International, argued that a “proportionality test” should be introduced into the arrest warrant system. That test would allow authorities in one EU state to decide against processing an extradition order from another if it does not regard the alleged offence as sufficiently serious.
“The European arrest warrant was intended to improve cross-border cooperation and standards of justice but in too many cases this new system has resulted in grave injustice,” Heard said. “People are being ripped from their homes and families, to spend months awaiting trial in appalling conditions, to face charges based on the flimsiest of evidence, or to serve a jail sentence imposed after a grossly unfair trial. Vital safeguards must be built into the EU justice system or we will see more cases of injustice.”
Tony Bunyan from Statewatch, a civil liberties group, expressed concern about how a proposed new “European investigation order” would “go even further” than the arrest warrant system. Under the new proposal, authorities from one EU country can seek that individuals in another are placed under surveillance.
As EU governments consider broadening the scope of police and judicial cooperation in the Union, Robert Hörchner vows to keep fighting for a retrial. The arrest warrant system should be fundamentally rethought, he argues, so that it is limited to offences which can be defined as terrorist.
His wife Annelies said that their entire family – the couple have twin daughters, who have recently turned 27 – have suffered enormously. “For us, for our children, it’s a horror story.”
·First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), 24 November 2010
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Bowing to Big Brother - in America
Private information on innocent citizens will be handed over to U.S. law enforcement authorities under an agreement slated for approval by the European Parliament this week.
In February, members of the Parliament (MEPs) rejected a plan to allow data on everyday bank transactions be given to the U.S., citing concerns over fundamental civil rights. Four months later, however, MEPs are expected to endorse the same plan July 8, having been granted a small number of concessions.
The whole affair has its roots in a U.S. move to snoop on data held by Swift, a Belgian-based company that facilitates exchanges between banks, following the 11 September 2001 atrocities. Under the pretext of tracking the “money trail” of terrorists, the Washington authorities used subpoenas to gain access to Swift’s data. Yet even though personal details on millions of individuals were transferred across the Atlantic, the public was not informed that such transfers were taking place until a report appeared in The New York Times during 2006.
Eager to allow the transfers continue, the European Union’s governments accepted an accord designed to give Washington the necessary legal cover in November last year. This accord drew an angry response from civil liberties watchdogs, who pointed out that people whose data was abused would have no means of seeking redress. America’s privacy legislation only offers protection against unlawful data processing to U.S. citizens and residents, not to outsiders under scrutiny by the U.S. authorities.
The Parliament’s revolt against that accord was prompted in large measure by how MEPs felt they had been excluded from talks over the accord’s content and by their desire to exercise new powers under the EU’s Lisbon treaty, which gives them a greater say in many policy areas. As a result, the Union’s governments and Barack Obama’s administration in the U.S. sought to address some of their concerns. A few modifications to the agreement have been made, including a provision for stationing an EU official in Washington to monitor the accord’s implementation.
But privacy campaigners say that the core deficiencies in the agreement have not been remedied.
“The fundamental points that were rejected by the Parliament the first time are in the text again,” Joe McNamee from the group European Digital Rights said. “It seems that what the Parliament has been searching for is a way of backing down. The amount of data involved remains pretty much the same.”
The data held by Swift includes the names of bank account holders and the numbers of those accounts. Because the volume of information concerned is so vast, the EU’s own Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx has protested that the measures envisaged in the November accord “interfere with the private life of all Europeans”. There are no guarantees that data will no longer be stored after a certain length of time or after it has been proven to be of no benefit in an investigation, he has observed.
Alexander Alvaro, a German Liberal MEP who has been tasked with drafting the Parliament’s official response to the accord, said that he and his colleagues “have got clear concessions” since February. The EU official sent to Washington will be able to block the transfer of data if it is being abused, he claimed.
Although his stance is being supported by a majority in the Parliament, some MEPs are continuing to voice serious misgivings. Opponents say that the agreement is illegal because it violates the right to privacy, which is enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. All EU countries are required to respect that convention.
Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green, said: “Nothing has really changed. All sorts of personal data concerning innocent European citizens are still being sent to the U.S.”
Rui Tavares, a Portuguese left-wing MEP, said European citizens will be discriminated against as a result of the agreement. “We know full well that this doesn’t change American law and that it doesn’t go through the American Congress,” he added.
Sophie in ’t Veld, a Dutch Liberal MEP who specialises in civil liberties, said she was only supporting the revised accord because she did not believe it would be politically possible to hammer out a better deal. “There is no reason for jubilation but it is the least bad option,” she added, warning that the accord’s shortcoming left it vulnerable to legal challenges.
As part of the changes to the agreement, the EU has undertaken to set up its own “terrorism finance tracking programme”, so that it can analyse bank transactions within Europe. Supporters of the accord say that this step should enable the Union to eliminate the bulk transfer of data to the Americans.
The latest agreement also gives Europol, the EU’s police cooperation agreement, a role in its implementation. But privacy campaigners point out that Europol is not a data protection body and that it will have a chance to request access to data for its own investigations. “Europol has been given an incentive not to restrict the amount of data transferred,” said McNamee from European Digital Rights.
This is not the first time that the European Parliament has succumbed to pressure to approve controversial measures that the U.S. has sought as part of the “war on terror” declared by its former President George W. Bush. In 2005, for example, MEPs accepted sweeping measures to make telecommunications firms retain details of all phone calls and email messages made and sent by ordinary citizens.
•First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), 7 July 2010
In February, members of the Parliament (MEPs) rejected a plan to allow data on everyday bank transactions be given to the U.S., citing concerns over fundamental civil rights. Four months later, however, MEPs are expected to endorse the same plan July 8, having been granted a small number of concessions.
The whole affair has its roots in a U.S. move to snoop on data held by Swift, a Belgian-based company that facilitates exchanges between banks, following the 11 September 2001 atrocities. Under the pretext of tracking the “money trail” of terrorists, the Washington authorities used subpoenas to gain access to Swift’s data. Yet even though personal details on millions of individuals were transferred across the Atlantic, the public was not informed that such transfers were taking place until a report appeared in The New York Times during 2006.
Eager to allow the transfers continue, the European Union’s governments accepted an accord designed to give Washington the necessary legal cover in November last year. This accord drew an angry response from civil liberties watchdogs, who pointed out that people whose data was abused would have no means of seeking redress. America’s privacy legislation only offers protection against unlawful data processing to U.S. citizens and residents, not to outsiders under scrutiny by the U.S. authorities.
The Parliament’s revolt against that accord was prompted in large measure by how MEPs felt they had been excluded from talks over the accord’s content and by their desire to exercise new powers under the EU’s Lisbon treaty, which gives them a greater say in many policy areas. As a result, the Union’s governments and Barack Obama’s administration in the U.S. sought to address some of their concerns. A few modifications to the agreement have been made, including a provision for stationing an EU official in Washington to monitor the accord’s implementation.
But privacy campaigners say that the core deficiencies in the agreement have not been remedied.
“The fundamental points that were rejected by the Parliament the first time are in the text again,” Joe McNamee from the group European Digital Rights said. “It seems that what the Parliament has been searching for is a way of backing down. The amount of data involved remains pretty much the same.”
The data held by Swift includes the names of bank account holders and the numbers of those accounts. Because the volume of information concerned is so vast, the EU’s own Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx has protested that the measures envisaged in the November accord “interfere with the private life of all Europeans”. There are no guarantees that data will no longer be stored after a certain length of time or after it has been proven to be of no benefit in an investigation, he has observed.
Alexander Alvaro, a German Liberal MEP who has been tasked with drafting the Parliament’s official response to the accord, said that he and his colleagues “have got clear concessions” since February. The EU official sent to Washington will be able to block the transfer of data if it is being abused, he claimed.
Although his stance is being supported by a majority in the Parliament, some MEPs are continuing to voice serious misgivings. Opponents say that the agreement is illegal because it violates the right to privacy, which is enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. All EU countries are required to respect that convention.
Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green, said: “Nothing has really changed. All sorts of personal data concerning innocent European citizens are still being sent to the U.S.”
Rui Tavares, a Portuguese left-wing MEP, said European citizens will be discriminated against as a result of the agreement. “We know full well that this doesn’t change American law and that it doesn’t go through the American Congress,” he added.
Sophie in ’t Veld, a Dutch Liberal MEP who specialises in civil liberties, said she was only supporting the revised accord because she did not believe it would be politically possible to hammer out a better deal. “There is no reason for jubilation but it is the least bad option,” she added, warning that the accord’s shortcoming left it vulnerable to legal challenges.
As part of the changes to the agreement, the EU has undertaken to set up its own “terrorism finance tracking programme”, so that it can analyse bank transactions within Europe. Supporters of the accord say that this step should enable the Union to eliminate the bulk transfer of data to the Americans.
The latest agreement also gives Europol, the EU’s police cooperation agreement, a role in its implementation. But privacy campaigners point out that Europol is not a data protection body and that it will have a chance to request access to data for its own investigations. “Europol has been given an incentive not to restrict the amount of data transferred,” said McNamee from European Digital Rights.
This is not the first time that the European Parliament has succumbed to pressure to approve controversial measures that the U.S. has sought as part of the “war on terror” declared by its former President George W. Bush. In 2005, for example, MEPs accepted sweeping measures to make telecommunications firms retain details of all phone calls and email messages made and sent by ordinary citizens.
•First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), 7 July 2010
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