GENOA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 17th November, 2020) Lack of cohesion within the European Union at the level of intelligence increases the bloc's vulnerability in the face of terrorism, Marco Lombardi, director of the Italian Team for Security, Terroristic Issues and Managing Emergencies (ITSTIME), told Sputnik in an interview.
"National security is hardly shared both at the political level and at the practical level when you are in Europe. Everyone tends to do his own thing. This is a problem, because not having cohesion between countries increases the overall vulnerability of the European system. This is a serious vulnerability for dealing with terrorism, which by its nature is transnational. Terrorism does not respect borders, like the pandemic. So either we work together, or the vulnerability of each country increases," Lombardi, who is also codirector of the National Observatory on Radicalization and Counter Terrorism (ReaCT) and a member of the Governmental Commission on Counter Radicalization and of the Strategic Policy Committee of the Italian foreign ministry, said.
Anti-terrorism cooperation must be based on information sharing, but this is not possible if there is no dedicated governmental unit for it, the researcher noted.
"Information sharing means sharing information because we share the same mission. This is not in place in Europe. What we currently have is the information exchange: I give information to you if you give information to me in return. I don't give information for free, I give it to you only if you give me something in return, because we must be mutually useful. It is a different thing. This works between the operational levels of the police. But what we need is information sharing, but for this we should have European intelligence," Lombardi said.
The expert went on to advocate a pan-European intelligence unit.
"The intelligence of each country is accountable by law to the government of its country, it cannot respond to any supranational entity. Information sharing will only be possible when we have a form of European political governance. For now, we will have to keep on with information exchange. This is certainly not enough to combat a terrorism that is increasingly widespread," he continued.
On November 13, the home affairs ministers of EU member states held a video conference to discuss the fight against terrorism in the wake of a series of deadly terrorist attacks in France and Austria in October and November. At the final press conference of the video summit, German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said that the exchange of information between member states or firearms control must be improved.
Europe is seeking to ramp up its fight against radical Islamism and terrorism after several brutal religiously-motivated attacks in France and Austria in October and early November. A 21-year-old man from Tunisia killed three people in a church in France's southern city of Nice, including two by beheading, on October 29. Two weeks before that, a 17-year-old local Muslim teen beheaded a Parisian teacher who showed caricatures of Islamic prophet Muhammad during a freedom of speech lesson. Another terrorist attack took place in Austria on November 2, claiming the lives of four people, excluding the perpetrator, and injuring 17 others.
