EU interior and justice ministers held a crisis meeting in Brussels on Thursday to establish a joint response following the deadly terror attacks in
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EU interior and justice ministers held a crisis meeting in Brussels on Thursday to establish a joint response following the deadly terror attacks in Brussels.
Tuesday’s blasts left more than thirty people dead and hundreds more injured. One of the blasts took place just two hundred metres from the European Commission.
Earlier in the day, the Belgian Interior and Justice ministers offered their resignation. An offer refused by the Belgian Prime Minister who said “in time of war, you cannot leave the field.”
It came as Turkey revealed it had warned Belgium about one of the attackers who blew himself up at Brussels airport.
Belgian Justice Minister, Koen Geens, underlined the need for more and better intelligence sharing.
“An issue which was very important is the full exchange of judicial information. Every day we discover in the framework of what happened in Paris in in Brussels how important it is that our intelligence services, that our judicial services exchange all relevant information that is required”, he said.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve called for the implementation of PNR, or Personal Name Record, a system of tracking names and itineraries for air travel passengers.
“We need to strengthen controls along the EU’s external borders – that means that member states need to change how their airports operate quickly to make sure that happens.”
Euronews Brussels correspondent, James Franey explains that “calling for more intelligence sharing and better cooperation on terrorism is in fact nothing new. The EU has done this before after previous terror attacks on this continent. the only problem is: this is a policy area that is jealously guarded by the EU’s member states.’”