An emergency summit of
European Union interior and justice ministers held Thursday in
the wake of bloody Islamist terror attacks in Brussels failed to
come up with a rapid joint counter-terror response.
On Tuesday, 32 people were confirmed dead and another 300
were wounded - 61 of them critically - in two suicide bombings
at the Belgian capital's Zaventem airport and on a metro line
serving EU institutions.
The ministers from the 28 EU member countries delayed
moving forward on a European Commission directive on the sharing
of air passenger name record (PNR) data to some time in April,
and to reconvene in June to discuss intelligence-sharing.
The Commission's PNR directive would transfer air passenger
data to member states' law enforcement authorities for the
prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of
terrorist offences and serious crime.
The European Council approved a compromise text hammered
out with the European Parliament on December 4, 2015 - three
weeks after the November 13 Islamist terror attacks in Paris
that claimed 130 lives.
The EP Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee
endorsed that text on December 10, but the European Parliament
as a whole has yet to vote on the measure.
"This text cannot remain bogged down," said French Interior
Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.
"Terrorism is fast, Europe is often slow," said Italian
Interior Minister Angelino Alfano, who has proposed exporting
Italy's national anti-terrorism committee model to Europe. Italy
has been pushing for intelligence-sharing since its EU duty
presidency in the second half of 2014.
"These attacks are shocking but not surprising," said
Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship
Dimitris Avramopoulos. "Citizens are tired and frightened. I
didn't come here just to talk - something has to change."
Avramopoulos added that the terrorists who carried out the
Brussels attacks were known to intelligence.
"If we had shared the information we could have prevented
(the attacks)," he said. "The same goes for those who carried
out the Paris attacks".
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