“The
Stockholm Program.” The “Future Group.” The names of the European
Union’s surveillance initiatives sound like they come from a spy novel.
But this major assault on civil liberties within Europe is no fiction.
“The EU has gone much further than the usa in terms of the legislation it has adopted to place its citizens under surveillance,” the European Civil Liberties Network (ecln)
opined in April. “While the Patriot Act has achieved notoriety, the EU
has quietly adopted legislation on the mandatory fingerprinting of all
EU passport, visa and residence permit-holders and the mandatory
retention—for general law enforcement purposes—of all
telecommunications data (our telephone, e-mail and Internet usage
records) and all air traveler data (on passengers into, out of and
across Europe).”
“Under national laws implementing EU legislation, state agencies
are beginning to build up a previously unimaginably detailed profile of
the private and political lives of their citizens, often in the absence
of any data protection standards, judicial or democratic controls,” the
ecln warned.
When the Stockholm Program comes online, this situation will get even worse.
The Stockholm Program is the third in a series of five-year plans
setting the agenda for justice and home affairs and security policy in
Europe. It will go into operation when the Hague Program expires at the
end of 2009.
The program was planned by the “Future Group,” a committee also
known as the Informal High-Level Advisory Group of the Future of
European Home Affairs Policy. The group was organized by the European
Justice Commission. The EU nation with the best track record on
justice, Britain, had no say in what the committee did—London only had
an “observer” on it.
Unlike the previous programs, the Stockholm Program is set to become the EU’s first-ever internal security policy.
Jacques Barrot, European justice and security commissioner, said on
June 9 that the program’s aim was to “develop a domestic security
strategy for the EU.”
“National frontiers should no longer restrict our activities,” he said.
Mary Ellen Synon, in an article at the Mail Online, describes how the program will work inside the framework of the Lisbon Treaty:
The Lisbon Treaty gives new legal powers to
the European institutions over, among other things, cross-border police
cooperation, counterterrorism, immigration, asylum and border controls.
The Stockholm Program outlines how the Justice Commission will
implement these new legal powers for the next five years.
“The commission claims the program covers policy on ‘freedom,
security and justice serving the citizen,’” she writes. “Look closer
and you will see it actually covers policy for restrictions on the
citizen, surveillance by the European state—yes, your fingerprints,
credit card charges, e-mail traffic and health records are now going to
be available from Galway to Bucharest—and the destruction of British
judicial independence by the European institutions.”
The European Justice Commission published its proposals based on the Future Group’s conclusions on June 10, and European justice ministers will hold talks on the program on July 15. After reading their June 10 report, Tony Bunyan of the ecln wrote:
What stands out are the proposals related to
the Future Group report …. What is new is the clear aim of creating the
surveillance society and the database state. Future generations, for
whom this will be a fully developed reality, will look back at this era
and rightly ask, Why did you not act to stop it?
The ecln predicts that within
the next five years there will be “an EU ID card and population
register, ‘remote’ (online) police searches of computer hard drives,
Internet surveillance systems, satellite surveillance,” as well as
“EU-funded detention centers and refugee camps,” “more power for EU
agencies,” and “interlinking of national police systems,” among other
things.
The Stockholm Program shows not only a marked shift toward a single
European state, but also reveals its authoritarian nature—a trend the Trumpet has followed closely. It is likely to anger some EU nations, especially Britain.
Mark Francois,
Britain’s Conservative spokesman on Europe, warned: “These are
potentially dangerous proposals which could interfere in Britain’s
internal security.”
Brussels is well aware of this fact. An anonymous EU official told the Daily Telegraph,
“The British and some others will not like it as it moves policy to the
EU. Some of [the] things we want to do will only be realistic with the
Lisbon Treaty in place, so we need that too.”
As well as pushing Europe to the right, and civil liberties out the door, the Stockholm Program could push Britain out of Europe.