EU ministers mulled Friday whether to extend border checks within the passport-free Schengen zone for up to two years and pushed for the sharing of air passenger name information following the Paris a
EU ministers mulled Friday whether to extend border checks within the passport-free Schengen zone for up to two years and pushed for the sharing of air passenger name information following the Paris attacks.
Border security has come under scrutiny after the massacre in the French capital involving jihadists able to travel freely, and the pressure from nearly 900,000 refugees and migrants arriving in Europe in 2015.
Led by France, interior ministers from the 28-nation European Union pressed for the adoption by the European Parliament by the end of 2015 of a US-backed data-sharing system for air travellers.
European legislators, who have the final say on whether the scheme is adopted, are showing increasing support for the idea after years of blocking it over reservations about personal privacy.
“It’s very important that we have the Passenger Name Records. Terrorists use intra-European flights and we have to trace their movements in order to be able to prevent terrorist risks,” French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.
The EU is considering a measure that would give a new EU border force powers to intervene and guard a member state's external frontier to protect the Schengen open-borders zone, EU officials and diplomats said on Friday. Such a move would be controversial. It might be blocked by states wary of surrendering sovereign control of their territory. But the discussion reflects fears that Greece's failure to manage a flood of migrants from Turkey has brought Schengen's open borders to the brink of collapse.
France wants to keep unmasked data for at least a year, while Parliament, in its latest official position, has refused to go beyond six months.
Meanwhile the interior ministers are also expected to discuss whether to extend for up to two years border checks within the passport-free Schengen zone to help many of them cope with record migrant inflows. The worst migrant crisis since World War II has raised fears that the Schengen zone, a pillar of the European project alongside the euro currency, has come under pressure from the flow of migrants and refugees.
Countries like Germany, Austria and Sweden in the last few months have all reintroduced temporary border controls as they were overwhelmed by the flow of asylum seekers, most of whom entered the EU through Greece.
Both the migrant crisis and the Paris attacks have highlighted the thorny political problems beneath the EU s dream of unity.
The United States has for years been pushing the European Union to adopt a PNR system, and President Barack Obama called anew on the EU to implement it in the wake of the November 13 attacks that left 130 people dead in Paris.
The two agreed on the exchange of data in 2010 which the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said offered full data protection but many MEPs were suspicious and repeatedly held up approval.
Revelations of US intelligence snooping made by former US security contractor Edward Snowden boosted such doubts but recent attacks by Islamist extremists in Europe have changed the tone.
Switzerland will draft unilateral curbs on immigration by March 2016 should it fail to strike a deal with the European Union over limits on the free movement of people, President Simonetta Sommaruga said Friday.
With the 28-nation EU being Switzerland's largest trading partner, any Swiss bid to seek to limit immigration risks angering partners and potentially damaging its economy.
Switzerland is prepared to see its bilateral economic accords with the European Union put on ice if the two sides cannot strike a compromise on curbing the in flowof foreign EU workers, foreign minister Didier Burkhalter said on Thursday. He was addressing a news conference after the governments said it would draft legislation allowing unilateral restrictions that contradict the free movement of workers, a key tenet of the bilateral treaties.
