Letter from Brussels

Written by Graham Watson MEP and published in West Wiltshire Messenger on Mon 5th Apr 2004

Much of our work in the European Parliament recently has been about tackling terrorism.

We started this before the Al Qu'aeda attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. I was the Chairman of our Committee on Justice and Home Affairs at the time and my recommendations on what we needed to do to make ourselves safer were voted through in Strasbourg on 6th September 2001.

Local Euro MP, Graham Watson, says that countries have to work together to crack terorism.

EU governments would have ignored them for months, were it not for the tragic attack five days later. In the weeks and months immediately after those attacks we passed laws to crack down on money laundering by terrorist groups; to make it easier for police to arrest terrorist suspects across national borders and to get the judicial authorities and anti-terrorism experts from EU member states working together.

But all the good intentions spoken then got bogged down in the problem of persuading national governments to work together. When the European Commission proposed a budget of fifteen million euros to get our intelligence experts working together the national governments cut it to one million.

It was only Liberal Democrat action in Brussels and Strasbourg that pushed it back up to nine million euros, the minimum we need. If this co-operation has been in place earlier we might have prevented the Madrid railway bombings.

Since the terrorist attacks in Madrid, national governments have woken up again. They now realise they have to get their act together. They've appointed Gijs de Vries, a former Lib Dem MEP (and one of my predecessors as Leader of the Lib Dems in the European Parliament) to co-ordinate their anti-terrorism work. I'm sure he'll do a good job.

Countries have to work together to crack terrorism.

A terrorist can be half way across Europe before the law has got its boots on. So why is it that Tory MEPs vote against cross-border measures to fight terrorism?

Related Link:

[Graham Watson MEP's website]