EU Agree Plan for Police Forces to place radicals & protestors under Surveillance

international | rights, freedoms and repression | news report

Thursday June 10, 2010 15:28

by gramsci fan

"Intensive surveillance" of anti-globalisation and extreme left activists

Documents obtained by Statewatch give details of EU-wide agreement for intensive and intrusive surveillance of a range
of activists including far left and anti-globalisation activists.

On April 26th the EU Council agreed a "standardised, multi-dimensional semi-structured instrument for collecting data and information on the processes of radicalisation in the EU".

The information to be gathered includes detailed and intrusive information under 70 different categories about movements and individual activists including those categorised as anti-globalisation and extreme left.

A summary by Statewatch is available online at http://www.statewatch.org/analyses/no-98-eu-surveillanc...s.pdf

A summary by the Guardian is online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/08/uk-monitors-su...print

The "instrument" itself is online at http://www.statewatch.org/news/2010/apr/eu-council-rad-...0.pdf

People should download the above StateWatch pdf and read it. For example one part summaries the EU plan:

Each agency in every state will be free to work to their own definitions and assumptions on individuals and groups and freely circulate these around the EU. What is being planned is a large-scale, automated, risk profiling system to target so-called “agents” of “radicalisation”.

There are millions of people in the EU with “radical” ideas (in the eyes of the state) who may easily, in their own terms, use arguments which are also used by so-called RMs without any intention whatsoever of using or encouraging violence.

Furthermore this initiative comes on top of plans under the Stockholm Programme to create an EU-wide database on political activists (protestors) under the guise of tackling “violent troublemakers”.

This is all justified with the equation between radicalism and violence. In the Irish context, of course, the far left and anti-globalisation protestors have more typically been the targets of violence from the very police forces who will now be given an added impetus for intensive and intrusive surveillance. Those of us who have been at RTS, Mayday, the Bush protests, Rossport, the recent Dail protests or other contexts might feel that it should rather be us who should be investigating the threat of violence from the Gardai...