EU in disarray over Europol Convention (feature)
01 November 1994
The Justice and Home Affairs Council failed to agree on 30 November, the delay gives parliaments and civil liberties groups the chance to question the lack of accountability and data protection.
Major areas of disagreement over the draft Europol Convention came to the surface at the meeting of the Council of Justice and Home Affairs Ministers in Brussels on 30 November - 1 December. The German Presidency of the EU (July-December 1994) was committed to getting the Convention signed at this meeting - indeed it had signalled that this was to be its main achievement under the "third pillar" (policing, immigration and judicial cooperation) in the autumn of 1993.
The Working Party on Europol had held 28 meetings prior to this Council and two more were scheduled for 6 and 7 December to tidy up any loose ends prior to the full EU "Summit" meeting of Prime Ministers in Essen, Germany on 9 and 10 December. In the event the Ministers were further away from agreement than they had been at the start of the German Presidency - on the present count there have been at least 7 "draft" Europol Conventions.
In July the UK government's long-standing opposition to any role being given to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in determining disputes - either between the 12 states, the staff and the Director, or individual members of the public remained on the table. It was also known that Spain wanted terrorism to be included in the objectives of Europol - this emerged at the beginning of the year under the Belgian Presidency (January-June 1994). By the time of the "informal" meeting of the Justice and Home Affairs Council in Berlin on 7 September neither of these major questions had been resolved and a new set of objections from France had emerged. The French Interior Minister, Charles Pasqua, demanded that the so-called "architecture" of the Europol computer data system be changed so that national police agencies (in the UK, the National Criminal Intelligence System, NCIS) would have access to both levels of intelligence to be stored. There is no dispute that national police agencies should have access to the first level - data put in by each of the 12/15 states. The French however also want access to the second level - here after work by "analysts" intelligence from more than one source (say from "third" countries) is to be held with a high-level of security. By the time of the meeting on 30 November none of these questions had been resolved, indeed it was to become even more confusing as other countries started taking sides in each of the issues - the Dutch government, for example, came out emphatically in favour of the European Court of Justice resolving disputes (their argument being that this was the first of four Conventions to the Council would be considering and they could not accept the ECJ being written out of all of them).
Greece and Denmark supported the Spanish case for terrorism to be included. Spain was dismissive of an attempt by Germany to introduce "car crime" as one of the "list of crimes" to be covered - how they argued could it be justified to include "car crime" when terrorism was being excluded? Discussion over this question then became confused with the French demand for access to both levels of intelligence. The UK, Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands arguing that there could not possibly be access to the "sensitive" information held in the second level if this was also to include intelligence on terrorist groups. While Greece and Spain came in to support the French position, Germany back the former countries in opposition. The ulterior motive of the UK and Germany in opposing the inclusion of terrorism was to keep the existing "Trevi" network of Special Branches and internal security agencies outside the purview of the Council (and hence of any need to report on its work through the K4 Committee structure). The French argued that they had to "trust their officers" which is precisely what the UK and oth