MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 09th December, 2020) The European Union's new counterterrorism agenda is "flawed" in its premise that curbing freedoms and stepping up surveillance could help crack down on radicalization, while in reality such practices further contribute to profiling and a social divide, an international rights group said on Wednesday, following the paper's publication.
Unveiled earlier in the day, the new anti-terror agenda aims to boost the bloc's resilience to radicalism and terrorist threats. The strategy offers to step up risk assessment, adopt rules to tackle terrorist and extremist content online, strengthen preventive action in prisons and focus more on rehabilitation and reintegration of formerly radicalized people. Other measures include more effective physical protection of public spaces, systematic checks at borders, better police interaction, a stronger mandate for Europol, and a balanced approach to encrypted information.
"The premise of this proposal is flawed. It falsely posits that more surveillance and more restrictions on our freedom of expression are the price we have to pay for our safety, but our human rights become more important in times of crisis, not less. The agenda takes a wrecking ball to our rights, proudly targeting encryption and expanding surveillance, including via the use of drones in public spaces," Eve Geddie, director of Amnesty International's European institutions office, said, as quoted in a press release.
She criticized the strategy for intent to boost investment in technologies to predict "abnormal or deviant behaviour and radicalisation risks."
"It's a mistake to think that these technologies are neutral. We know that they often target people of certain racial, religious and ethnic groups. Such profiling, like so many other counter-terrorism measures, has a discriminatory impact primarily on Muslims, and those perceived to be Muslim," the rights advocate argued.
Geddie expressed concerns that the measures would target online activity, "including non-violent speech," insisting that the bloc "must ensure that all lawful forms of expression are protected, including speech that is controversial or offensive."
"Jeopardising human rights and stigmatising minority groups will not make us safer, it will only stoke divisions," she added.
The fresh anti-terror agenda comes in the wake of a spate of terror attacks that has rocked Europe in recent months, including the killing of a French school teacher by a radicalized teen of Chechen origin near Paris, the stabbing attack in a church in Nice and the Vienna shooting.
