EU ministers agree to step up war on terror
European Union justice and interior ministers today agreed to step up their fight against terrorists, vowing to implement an EU anti-terror action plan by the end of the year.
In emergency talks called after the London bombings, the ministers said they would accelerate measures to cut off funding to terrorist groups and boost the sharing of intelligence needed in terror investigations.
The ministers said they would build on “pursuing and investigating terrorists across borders, to impede terrorists’ planning, disrupt supporting networks, cut off any funding and bring terrorists to justice.”
Home Secretary Charles Clarke, who chaired the anti-terror emergency talks in Brussels, said the EU would share more intelligence, which he said was crucial to hunting down terrorists and preventing more attacks.
“What we have to do is to accelerate the speed of our work and to agree on implementing anti-terror proposals to make the work of terrorism more difficult,” Mr Clarke said.
“All of us today are determined to achieve that,” he added.
The ministers also agreed to hold two minutes of silence at midday across the 25-nation bloc tomorrow – one week after the deadly bus and subway attacks that left at least 52 people dead and hundreds injured.
The EU remains “absolutely determined that the terrorists will not succeed,” they said, adding that the attacks were ”an affront to the universal values on which the EU is based.”
French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said the EU had to ensure it was not becoming a training ground for terrorists whose goal was attacking their own countries. ”We have to find out where they are being recruited and by whom,” he said. “It’s a question of surveillance.”
He confirmed that France had temporarily suspended the EU’s open-border agreement, allowing authorities to re-impose passport checks on frontiers with other EU neighbours.
