The European Commission adopted earlier this week on Wednesday, 9 December 2020, the Counter-Terrorism Agenda for the EU.
As terrorism remains a real and present threat, a new Counter-Terrorism Agenda was needed to effectively counter extremist ideologies, prevent radicalisation and better protect the public spaces terrorists target, while promoting full implementation of existing rules and tools.
Over the last two decades, European cooperation on counter-terrorism has advanced steadily and enhanced the capacity of Member States to ensure the security of their citizens.
The Agenda draws lessons from the evolving terrorism threat to step up cooperation at EU level, reinforce the available tools and where necessary fill policy and operational gaps, with the aim to better anticipate, prevent, protect and respond – the four pillar strategy to counter terrorism.
WHAT DO PEOPLE THINK OF THE AGENDA?
Ylva Johansson, European Commissioner for Home Affairs since 2019 has stated that “With the Counter Terrorism Agenda, we are boosting our ability to anticipate new threats, we are helping local communities to prevent radicalisation, we are giving cities the means to protect public spaces and we are ensuring that we can respond quickly and more efficiently to attacks.”
RED-Alert project in the Counter-Terrorism Agenda for the EU
One of the main priorities of the first pillar: ANTICIPATE is to reinforce early detection capacity. Within this priority, EU-funded project RED-Alert was added as an example for strengthening the early detection capacity of potential terrorist threats. This shows once again the importance of the project and the capabilities of the final solution.
RED-Alert is a European Union (EU) funded research and innovation project as part of the Horizon 2020 programme to develop new online content monitoring and analysis tools to combat terrorism.
The project that ended September this year brought together the best of European research and innovation experts with a consortium of 15 organisations – including ourselves, INSIKT Intelligence, and European Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) supported by Europol’s counter-terrorism unit.
For more information on this project please contact us at info@insiktintelligence.com.
