European External Intelligence Co-Operation

Main Tasks The Parliamentary Intelligence Control Committee is responsible for monitoring and reviewing the work of European level agencies involved in intelligence co-operation with respect to their mandate. The Committee should ensure independent quality control by judging the efficiency of the agencies and their products with the aim of promoting depoliticised, sober intelligence analysis with a clear separation between interpretation and hard data.174 The body should be obliged to transmit a written report for the full plenary of the EP and national parliaments in the middle and at the end of each legislative period. In a crisis situation it must be possible for the Control Committee to demand a special report on the matter, as could be for example an assessment of EU intelligence analysts on the current situation in Iran and the procurement of weapons of mass destruction. In order that the Committee is really in the position to make EU level intelligence agencies accountable, the introduction of the following measures would be appropriate: 1. It is indispensable to conclude a legal status for SITCEN laying down the mandate of this intelligence unit with a view to organisations, tasks, authorities in gaining information, form utilisation and storing of personal data, explicit definition of cases when the agencies are allowed to break Community law. In this respect comparative analyses with intelligence agencies laws should be undertaken by a working group of the parliamentary assembly of the WEU. 2. Enhanced transparency through further de-classification of documents. In this context the European Parliament should exert pressure for a review of the inter-institutional agreement of 2002 and the regulation EC No 1049/2001 regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents. Furthermore, all intelligence agencies of the EU, namely SITCEN, the European Satellite Centre, the intelligence Division of the military staff and the third pillar EUROPOL should be held responsible to submit annual reports on their work. [...]

institutions, academia and Non-Governmental Organisations in the “ESDP democracy project”.172 In the following this study will attempt to elaborate a proposal for an independent parliamentary intelligence committee, with similar tasking and authorisation as the law on parliamentary control in Germany grants. As responsibility for scrutiny over ESDP is shared with national parliaments, a shared composition of members of this committee would be necessary. The most appropriate place for the scrutiny of EU-level intelligence is the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC). Composition of the Committee Taking the shared responsibility between national parliaments and the European Parliament into consideration the Committee should consist of members of the national parliament and members of the European Parliament. The current number of 5 members within the special committee is clearly not enough to guarantee effective scrutiny as the members have not working capacity and expertise to cope with all the information, especially given that they don’t have the possibility to share the information with others. To increase the number by national parliament representatives is problematic because the more members the committee has the less the future Foreign Ministers or his intelligence analysts will open-up and develop a personal basis of trust. However, if one is serious about developing an effective democratic scrutiny there is no alternative to increasing the number of members in the control committee. The following composition seems to be workable: • 4 representatives from the European Parliament plus the Chairman of the FAC (members of the Foreign Affairs Committee and designated by the Conference of Presidents) 5 representatives from national parliaments (designated by the Conference of the Community and European Affairs Committees of Parliaments (COSAC)173. • a pool of 10 national intelligence experts (designated by COSAC and approved by the Council). The Intelligence Committee has the right to consult special experts for convocation and information in special cases. [...]

simplify the definition of the legal framework for European agencies and especially for their cooperation with their counterparts in each member state. 6.3.2 The creation of the EU Intelligence Control Committee In Germany the body in charge of control over all (sic!) national intelligence services is a special board of control within the Bundestag. The respective mutual obligations are laid down in the “Gesetz über die parlamentarische Kontrolle nachrichtendienstlicher Tätigkeit des Bundes”170. At the European level the only document related to the topic of parliamentary scrutiny is the interinstitutional agreement dating from 2002 which allows a small special committee access to confidential documents without any measures of control and is thus entirely insufficient. A legislation on the parliamentary control of EU agencies with similar phrasing is indispensable. Doing this the creation of a parliamentary control committee is necessary. Also, the body on the European level should have scrutiny over second pillar as well as third pillar agencies, because the pillar structure of the EU will be dismantled after the adoption of the Constitution. Also with regard to the main threat, being international terrorism, co-operation of security, police and external intelligence services will intensify. Once these rules have been defined, a parliamentary EU Intelligence Control Committee, with full access to EU agencies and their assessments and far more rights than the current Special Committee should be appointed to control that EU agencies comply with the defined mandate. The easiest solution would probably be to set up a joint committee composed of representatives from the national parliaments, or other bodies that control national intelligence agencies, and the European parliament. Such a solution would reflect that European agencies are accountable to member states as well as to the European parliament.171 As soon as the Constitutional Treaty is adopted, this will mark the end of the Brussels Treaty and with it of the WEU Assembly and widen the gap in the democratic control of ESDP. For this reason the European Parliament will have an increasing role in European security and defence questions as more decision-making will be done at the European level. Being aware of this, the European Union under the lead of the Commission undertakes endeavours to work out ways to close the accountability gap in democratic control of CFSP/ESDP manifested inter alia by the participation of key representatives from EU [...]