The need to investigate legal issues of common interest and of specific relevance for operational activity has recently arisen within the cooperation framework between European Intelligence and Security Services. For this reason future plans will include both a substantial increase in the exchange of information and in the number of meeting occasions between the various Legal Offices.
The objective is to widen the wealth of experience, knowledge and of documentation in the legal sector with a view to solving problems more efficiently and to coordinating the European intelligence community's approach towards Governments, and Parliaments, on issues relevant to national security and legal guarantees.
It is important to emphasize that in the current European context the need to rethink the role of intelligence, with reference to new emerging threats, goes hand in hand with the need to ensure a "firm grip" on the rule of law. Contemporary legislation is becoming more and more sensitive towards the growing requirements of legitimacy and transparency. In other words the task is to analyse intelligence activity's legal foundations taking into account the new context, in order to devise a role for Intelligence and Security Services that, in their various fields of activity, complies with legal principles. These cannot be bypassed within the current fast developing legislative reality.
Within this context the Bruges meeting represented the first approach. It focused on the following issues:
- cooperation and legal-institutional relations between Intelligence and Security Services and State Authorities, such as the Judiciary and the Administrative Authorities.
In particular, the need for a two-way cooperation between Services and Public Authorities has been emphasized.
It has been deemed imperative that this duty to cooperate should be provided for in national statutes. The specific procedures for implementation could then be regulated by ad hoc Protocols, as is already the case in some countries;
- access to classified information: conditions, limits and controls;
- use of classified information in judicial enquiries.
The need has arisen to find ways to harmonise the protection of the sources' identity and the intelligence supplied by them, with the necessity to respond to requests posed by the Judiciary in connection with investigations.
On this matter it was stressed that the protection of classified documents originated by the Services, where necessary for court proceedings, should be specifically provided for in legislation;
- State secrecy, in the various interpretations and the ways it is provided for in national laws.
Specific attention has been devoted to the different ways in which the existence of official secrets influences the surrendering of testimony.
The meeting has been extremely fruitful. The following themes have been selected as worthy of future investigation:
- terrorism
- organized crime
- telecommunication systems
- economic intelligence
- computer crime and other emerging threats
- recruitment and protection of sources
- Intelligence Services' modus operandi
- functional guarantees for Intelligence Services' members
- status of Intelligence Services' personnel
- relations between Intelligence Services and the overseeing Bodies
- relations between Intelligence Services and mass-media