On Sud Radio : should we suppress Schengen?
Guest of Philippe ROSSI in the programme ‘Les vraies voix’ on Sud-Radio on Thursday 5 November 2020 to debate the statements of President Emmanuel Macron on the strengthening of internal border controls in the Schengen area to fight against terrorism (60th min > 81st minute).
An opportunity to recall that Emmanuel Macron, during the debate in the 2017 inter-tour period, had retorted to his rival: “Madame Le Pen, terrorists are not stopped at the borders”. And to add that it is absolutely essential to track terrorists “but where they are, that is to say at the source”, in countries such as Iraq and Syria and on the soil of our countries.
I also expressed concern that the 2,400 additional personnel announced in France would be mobilised to monitor our thousands of kilometres of land borders in vain, whereas they would be much more useful if they targeted terrorists both within and beyond the borders – calling for operational efficiency to be given priority over political symbolism that borrows from that of the Maginot Line
I stressed the usefulness of Schengen as a “tool for police and judicial cooperation” between states, which could be improved, and recalled that “it is mainly thanks to the intelligence services that terrorists are arrested”: cooperation between Slovakia and Austria had worked well with the attack in Vienna, and the Austrian police did not act in spite of the information available to them. On the other hand, restoring our border controls would mean complicating “cross-border journeys for hundreds of thousands of honest people”, including 400 000 French cross-border workers, but also road hauliers, traders and consumers, “without catching any terrorists. »
Finally, I mentioned the opportunity that complementary advances would represent, such as the creation of a kind of “European FBI” or the extension of the prerogatives of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office to the fight against terrorism “in order to enable the public authorities and the intelligence services of the various Member States to cooperate better” and I hoped that this type of project would be one of the initiatives mentioned by Emmanuel Macron in the perspective of the French Presidency of the EU in the first half of 2022.