As from May, 2013 until 31 October 2014, the Supreme Court has implemented partnership in the project “Securing Europe through Counter-Terrorism: Impact, Legitimacy and Effectiveness” (acronym of the project is SECILE, project agreement No 313195), which is fully funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission. The project is managed by Durham University (the United Kingdom); non-governmental organisation “Statewatch” (the United Kingdom), Cork Institute of Technology (Ireland), Oslo Peace Research Institute (Norway), the Centre for Irish and European Security (Ireland), London Queen’s College (the United Kingdom) and the Supreme Court of the Republic of Latvia also participate in the project. In the Supreme Court, the project has been implemented by employees of the Division of Provision of Regime of Secrecy.
The goal of the project is to evaluate legitimacy and effectiveness of legal standards, which regulate field of security in Europe, taking into account legal, social, action and democratic prospect. After the terror acts in the USA on 11 September 2011, many legal standards were issued and many measures were carried out also in Europe to identify and prevent terrorism threats. These measures impact population and often – also private businessmen, but it is impossible to know always, if these measures really prevent terrorism only instead of interference with individuals’ private life, decrease of efficiency of business activities or lobby concrete industries, which implement security measures.
The main task of the Supreme Court within this project was to manage one of work stages – to study paradigms of impact, legitimacy and efficiency of existing antiterrorism measures in legal, sociological, action and democratic aspect; to explore strong and weak points, similar and different features of these prospects, so that it would be possible to verify these conclusions in practice.
It is concluded in result of research that 239 legal documents on combating of terrorism were adopted in the European Union between autumn of 2001 and summer of 2013 (catalogue of these documents was developed in the course of the project). Before implementation of counter-terrorism measures, their economic impact is analysed mainly, forgetting about social impact and thus affecting observation of human rights negatively. After implementation of measures, assessment thereof is performed rarely. Due to lack of systematic and comprehensive assessment of the counter-terrorism measures implemented by the European Union, their legitimacy, as well as efforts to understand impact of these measures and to assess their efficiency may be injured.
One may read all reports prepared in the course of the project on the web site of the project.
This document does not reflect opinion of the European Commission. Opinion and interpretations expressed in that reflect only views of its authors. The European Commission does not undertake any responsibility for further use of this information.