Foreign Fighters: EU increasingly involved in the fight to terrorists.

 BRUSSELS: – In order to allow the best implementation of its priorities  for preventing and combating terrorism,  the Council was recently asked  to authorize the EU Commissione to sign, on behalf of the Union, the  Council of Europe’s Convention regarding the Prevention of Terrorism,  and its Additional Protocol.
Let’s start with a clarification necessary to non-experts: the European  Council, the Council of the European Union and the Council of Europe  are totally different things. The European Council is  a purely political  institution, which does not hold any legislating power. It consists of the Heads of State or Government (who participate depending on the framework of national laws) and only adopts a policy agenda of the Union.
The Council of the European Union, together with the European Parliament, is instead the body responsible for lawmaking, in the co-decision procedure. It consists of the individual national ministers, who meet each others in certain “formations“, according to the subject to be discussed, and legislate on the basis of groups and subgroups within the Board, which consist of officers and directors of individual government departments, competent for items to be discussed.
The Council of Europe is an international organization totally alien to the European Union, which aims to promote democracy, human rights, the European cultural identity and the search for solutions to social problems in Europe. It is composed by 47 Member States and was created in 1949.
This mandatory digressione is useful to understand that the adoption of the Additional Protocol to the Convention is an important step forward in the view of a stronger European response to terrorism, in particular against the threat posed by the in-famous “foreign fighters”. The protocol implements some provisions of resolution 2178 (2014) of the UN Security Council on terrorists foreign fighters, such as the criminalization of activities such as travel to third countries for terrorist purposes (eg to receive training) or participation in terrorist groups’ actvivities or training for the purpose of terrorism. The Convention requires all Parties to designate permanent contact points to facilitate the rapid exchange of information about persons suspected of traveling abroad for terrorist purposes.
So far, the European Union has not signed the Convention and its additional protocol, but has implemented some of their provisions in the 2008 Framework Decision on Terrorism, which will be updated in 2016. Since the Protocol is an addition to the Convention, the Commission intends to sign both at once, to open the way for the implementation of their provisions. We look forward to the EU Council, in its “Justice and home affairs” formation. We hope it will give the green light to the signing of a document that will hinder even more growth and power of the subversive terrorist networks.