Roundup: Emerging security threats require increased cooperation: EU officials

Dimitris Avramopoulos, European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship, on Tuesday said emerging security threats required increased global cooperation.

"It is clear that the new and complex security threats that have emerged are increasingly cross-border and cross-sector in nature," he said, adding "EU citizens expect us to trust each other, to share information and to work effectively together to coordinate concrete actions, so we must face all these threats together."

Avramopoulos spoke to the media with Frans Timmermans, First Vice-President of the European Commission, after presenting the new European Agenda on Security to the European Parliament, which is in plenary session here until April 30.

"What we want to do is to put member states and institutions at the European level in a better position to work better together, to make sure we deliver security for our citizens," said Timmermans, who is also European Commissioner for Better Regulation, Inter-Institutional Relations, Rule of Law and Charter of Human Rights.

The new agenda, proposed for the period of 2015-2020, focuses on three threats seen as most pressing for the internal security of the EU: terrorism, organized crime, and cyber crime.

The agenda aims to reinforce existing organizations, such as Europol, the EU's law enforcement agency, as well as to create new security tools, such as the proposed Center of Excellence for the dissemination of expertise on combating radicalization.

Timmermans cited the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Copenhagen as examples of why the new agenda is urgently needed.

Avramopoulos made it clear, however, that the initiative was not just a reaction: "This agenda it is not just a response to the recent tragic events, we have started working on that since the very beginning of the life of the commission."

"(The agenda) is a start, it is a proposition by the commission to increase our cooperation. It is intended to make sure that agencies at the national level work better together, share more information," said Timmermans.

Both commissioners invoked transparency and the respect for human rights as being fundamental to the agenda, avoiding the interpretation of "information sharing" as a validation for mass surveillance.

The need to exchange information, even so, was an essential point for the commissioners.

"No single member state can tackle this problem on its own, we need to cooperate better together," said Timmermans. Endit