EU interior ministers agree at meeting in Paris to step up drive against radicalisation and disrupt movement of terrorist networks

The home secretary, Theresa May, led demands for a new Europe-wide travel database to track the movement of all air, train and ferry passengers at an emergency meeting of EU interior ministers in Paris on Sunday.

While 4 million people marched in the name of liberty across France, the EU ministers, joined by senior US ministers, agreed to step up their drive against radicalisation, particularly on the internet, and to disrupt the movement of terrorist networks.

The joint statement said: “We are further convinced of the crucial and urgent need to move toward a European passenger name record (PNR) framework, including intra-EU PNR. We are prepared to move forward, adopting a constructive approach with the European parliament.”

May said after the meeting: “There was firm support at the meeting for new action to share intelligence, track the movement of terrorists and defeat their ideology. It is important that we now deliver on these talks so we can keep all our citizens safe from the very serious threat we all face.”

But the decision by EU interior ministers to moves towards a “database state” brought a warning from leading members of the European parliament that such “big brother measures” involving blanket data retention without justification amounted to a distraction from the actual measures needed to deal with terrorism.

Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green and a leading member of the European parliament’s civil liberties committee, Libe, warned: “The mass storage of flight and passenger data is clearly at odds with EU law, as the European court of justice, has made clear. At the same time, far-reaching data collection in France would not have prevented the odious attacks in Paris this week.

“As with previous attacks, the perpetrators of the Paris attacks were already known to security authorities and had been the subject of investigations and supervision measures. Instead of creating an ineffective dragnet on all air passengers, security authorities should have been exchanging the data they already had on these suspects.”

May has been leading the drive to set up a database to track all passenger movements by air, by train or by ferry within Europe since 2011 but it has been blocked by the European parliament since 2013 over their privacy concerns that it would lead to passenger profiling.

The recent European court ruling that the mass storage of private personal data without grounds and without any time limit is at odds with fundamental privacy rights has further cast doubts on the legality of the proposed passenger name record system.

The EU has already concluded agreements to share passenger data, including credit card details and home addresses, on all transatlantic flights to and from the United States.

The EU interior ministers issued a joint statement in which they agreed to renew pressure on the major internet companies to step up their efforts to swiftly report and remove material that aims to incite hatred and terror.

They also agreed to initiate a Europe-wide counter-propaganda campaign which they said would send a positive, targeted and easily accessible message to a young audience who are vulnerable to indoctrination. Alongside this would be a new campaign to promote the respect of fundamental rights and values.

But they will continue to be focused on sharing intelligence about the movement of foreign fighters and the support they receive.

“We hope to swiftly finalise work engaged under the auspices of the European commission to step up the detection and screening of travel movements by European nationals crossing the EU’s external borders. To that end, we will more extensively detect and monitor certain passengers based on objective, concrete criteria which respect smooth border crossings, fundamental liberties and security requirements.”

This will involve greater exit checks on the Schengen databases of criminals and suspected terrorists by those leaving Europe, particularly on the way to Turkey, Syria and Iraq.