Police powers in Europe

On its way to the USA

[Reprinted from Issues & Views October 29, 2001]

Some troubled speculations from England's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who describes how the European Union's use of the war on terrorism is threatening freedoms in his country:

Dr Jurgen Storbeck [the German director of Europol, the EU's European Police Office] was already sitting on top of an embryonic FBI before the destruction of the World Trade Center. Now he is to bestride an embryonic CIA as well. The two are to be housed together under one roof at Europol's headquarters in The Hague. He will soon be one of the few men outside Pyongyang, Baghdad and a handful of other despotisms heading an agency with double access to law enforcement and intelligence secrets--something that every first-term student of political science is taught should never happen in a democracy.
For the first time, the EU has acquired an intelligence function. I expect that it will now mimic the exponential growth of Europol's police role, which has mushroomed from a tiny clearing house for data on drug trafficking five years ago, to a proto-FBI today with powers to "request"--i.e. launch--criminal probes, and to take part in joint operations with national police. . . .
A bad British law can be repealed by a future Parliament. Practically speaking, a bad EU law can never be repealed. It is part of that great magisterium, where it sits in perpetuity, infinitely easier to do than to undo. A terrorist is to be defined as anybody using "intimidation" seriously to alter the political, economic or social structures of states.
Once it is law, lodged in the acquis for ever, it can be applied to practically anything, such as anti-EU protest, and will increasingly fall under the ambit of the EU's federal police, investigating, and (soon) prosecuting authorities. I am willing to wager a small bet in euros that this anti-terrorism text, and especially the clause "unlawful seizure of property," will before the decade is out be used to charge a British citizen engaged in political dissent against the EU.