Briton to Urge Europe to Tighten Security

Britain’s chief law enforcement official will call on European leaders today to put biological data into passports, visas and identity cards, share airline passenger lists and retain telecommunications records to help fight international terrorists and organized crime.

Concerns for safeguarding liberties must be weighed against the right of law-abiding people to be protected from crime and terrorist attacks, Home Secretary Charles Clarke will argue, according to an advance text of his remarks released to reporters before his address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.

The British proposals to the EU come during a time of heightened fear of terrorism in Europe after the July 7 bombings of the London transportation network. They also coincide with growing public doubts about the merits of further European integration; this spring voters in France and the Netherlands rejected a proposed European constitution.

Drawing a connection between the issues, Clarke in his speech argues that a rising “Euro-skepticism” on the continent is in part due to doubts among ordinary people that European institutions are effective and sufficiently tough to protect them.

One solution he proposes is for Europe to adopt practical steps for police and security agencies to collect and share intelligence data and use them in cross-border prosecutions.

“This European Parliament, as well as national parliaments throughout Europe, needs to face up to the fact that the legal framework within which we currently operate makes the collection and use of this intelligence very difficult and in some cases impossible,” Clarke plans to tell his audience. “The rules that currently govern our law enforcement bodies seriously inhibit their ability to protect us against criminals.”

As an example of how laws undermine police efforts, Clarke cited regulations in some European countries that oblige telecom companies to destroy data on phone calls and electronic messages if they have no business purposes. Such information can be instrumental for police to establish links between suspects and to dismantle criminal networks, he argues.

Clarke says he hopes Britain’s proposals will lead to “hard-headed discussions and practical agreement.”

Britain recently assumed the presidency of the European Union, a post that rotates every six months.

Discussing his speech with reporters in London on Tuesday, Clarke said he was seeking to strike the right balance between preserving civil liberties and protecting the public. “It seems to me we have to give the same rights to those humans who want to be able to travel without being blown up on an underground train ... as we do to the defendants,” he said.

If European governments agreed to put “biometric data” into passports, visas and identity cards, Clarke said, the information would be “an important means of ensuring that people have the identity which is genuinely theirs, and [are] not stealing other identities as some criminals or terrorists seek to do.”

Clarke’s suggestion that national and European courts must be pragmatic and sensitive to public opinion in weighing whether to deport terrorist suspects could run into opposition from legislators who fear undermining the European Convention on Human Rights, which forbids extraditing or deporting suspects to countries that practice torture.

Britain, which wants to deport radical Islamic clerics that it accuses of fomenting hatred and violence, is in the process of negotiating bilateral agreements with several countries promising that deported prisoners would not face ill treatment, Clarke said.

Although opponents argue that the agreements would not be respected, Clarke said the existence of such an agreement between sovereign governments ought to be enough to satisfy European courts.

“The judges need to understand that the people of Europe and people of Britain will not for a long time accept that action cannot be taken against people who are offering a real threat to our way of life and who are seeking to destroy it,” he told the reporters Tuesday. “That is a message I shall send very strongly indeed.”