The EU's role in combating regional terrorist organisations

Abstract

Europe has gone through three waves of terrorism and is currently experiencing the fourth. This dissertation regards the third wave and focuses on the EU's role in combating regional-terrorist organizations in its Member States. Such groups were responsible for an average of four decades of attacks which caused the death of 5,000 people. Some splinters of the above mentioned organizations still do exist and carry out criminal acts, however they are much less deadly than they were throughout the 70's, 80's and early 90's and are constantly on the decline. Operational measures against terrorism were, throughout the bloody years of the infamous indigenous terrorist-groups, and still are, in the hands of the member states. However as early as the first Naples Convention the EU saw that cooperation between its member states can be the key to countering such crime effectively. This idea was given a stronger impetus through the ad hoe intergovernmental working group, TREVI. Set up in 1975, TREVI was shrouded in secrecy, and was the result of the culminating attacks on European soil, namely the alarming rate of hijacking and the Munich Massacre carried out by the PLO's black September. However the fact that the group bypassed the EC's, council, commission, EP and EPC made the TREVI weak, while any positions agreed upon throughout its meeting were not legally based. A decade later Europe started relaxing its borders, a decision that meant the greater mobility of regional-terrorist groups. This meant the carrying out of more efficient attacks by the groups which were now given the luxury to hunt their target in Member States with the most merciful criminal code. The ratification of Maastricht brought with 1t a newly engineered European Union which absorbed TREVI under its third Pillar of Justice and Home affairs. Title VI declared terrorism a common interest of the union, and set out to enhance judicial and police cooperation through the conceiving of a Europol and the promotion towards the harmonization of Member States' criminal codes. Unfortunately the same flaw continued throughout this period as Title VI had no legal basis. Amsterdam took the Union a step further and transferred civil aspects of the JHA pillar, but left the criminal elements in the intergovernmental realm. However Amsterdam ratified the Europol convention and pledged to work towards an Area of freedom security and Justice, which was then looked at in further detail through Tampere. While Nice was waiting for ratification, Manhattan and Washington looked like a scene from Dante. This stimulated the EU to devise legally based supra-national instruments to combat international-terrorists. Such instruments proved to be of an effect on Regional-terrorists groups, which by now had lost most of their popularity and support. The 9/11 security pack, which wasn't ratified by all Members of the Union until Madrid's 2004 attacks, included efficient instruments which were responsible to execute the freezing of funds of numerous regional-terrorist and terrorist organizations around Europe; mostly in Spain, Italy, the UK and Ireland, as well as hundreds of arrests of ETA members, and a smoother extraditing system. On mid-night of the 26th of March 2006 the last deadly regional terrorist group, the ETA, declared that negotiations fitted the contemporary political spectrum better and were a superior substitute to violence, hence they permanently laid down their arms. Following the renouncement of arms by this group- Europe wrapped up the last wave of terrorism. Signs of the third wave started being felt as early at the 1960's, when Europe was at its initial stages of forming its identity as an organization that brought peace and stability to a devastated continent coming out of WWII. Unenthusiastic and indisposed Europe is traced to have dragged her feet when it came to combat groups of young European terrorists, until being shocked by the magnitude that such a crime had managed to lead to, not only on the other side of the Atlantic, but also back home.