Civil Liberties

From asylum to police cooperation, transparency and data protection, MEPs in the Civil Liberties committee discussed on Wednesday the priorities outlined by the Swedish ministers of Justice and Migration for their Council presidency. The “Stockholm programme” will aim to frame legislation on third pillar issues for the next five years, after being adopted in Council in December. The EP will define its priorities in a resolution to be voted this autumn. The minister for Justice Beatrice Ask said that the Council Presidency’s work “will consistently be based on the citizen’s perspective”. Thus, the Stockholm programme “should balance measures of a more repressive kind with measures to protect the personal integrity and the fundamental rights of the individual”. She stressed that the presidency will push for “confidence-building measures” in order to reinforce mutual trust between police and judicial authorities of the Member states and thus to achieve the common area of Justice, Liberty and Security. Beatrice Ask proposed “a kind of “erasmus” programme for judges, prosecutors and police”.  She also would like to see Europol serve “as a hub for European police cooperation”, and suggested that the EU should tackle crime in a number of “pilot areas”, among which trafficking in human beings, terrorism, exploitation of children, drugs-trafficking, IT crime, forgery, white-collar crime and corruption. The Presidency will aim to achieve a strategy on exchange of information in order to fight serious crime, but “there is no interest or need in neither registering information about the daily activities of ordinary citizens, their political or religious views, nor private concerns”, she said. Beatrice Ask underlined that “openness is traditionally an issue that we cherish in Sweden”, and although she considers that “the current regulation works well, there is a need in clarifying and modifying the legislation in the light of how it has been applied” she said.