Golden lady justice, Bruges,Belgium. Flickr/Emmanuel Huybrechts. Some rights reserved.A few weeks after the Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket, over-reliance on intelligence and intelligence-led policing has been, once again, debated at the EU level. Yesterday, the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) committee presented a report on the National security and secret evidence in legislation and before the courts[M1] .
This report examines the way in which justice systems across a selection of EU Member States (the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden) use and rely on intelligence information that is kept secret and not disclosed to the defendants and judicial authorities in the name of national security.
There are a number of key European legal standards on the issues of intelligence information, national security and state secrets when these affect the rights of the defence. The rights of the defence and a fair trial are enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (Title VI on Justice), which now has the same values as the EU Treaties and therefore constitutes a key constitutional foundation-stone of the EU's Area of Freedom, Security and Justice.
