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Terrorism, Risk, and Legislation
Such legislation and programming represents also a move towards a unified
security concept joining internal and external concepts of safety and
security. This becomes for example visible in a recent threat assessment
made by the European Union which sees the key threats in terrorism,
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, organized crime, regional
(violent) conflicts and failed states (European Council, 2003). It seems then
that such threats are interrelated and require a “mixture of instruments”
which combines intelligence, police, judiciary, military and economic
means (European Council, 2003, p. 7). Anti-terrorism legislation represents
furthermore cross sectional legislative activities that are made up out of
amendments of immigration laws, police laws, laws on secret services,
telecommunication laws, general criminal and procedural laws, economic
laws, general order laws as well as legislation establishing particular powers
in monitoring professional activities in sensitive areas. Out of this cross
sectional nature follows the basic problem associated with new anti-terrorist
legislation. This type of legislation interferes in civil society in a way which
understands freedom and uncontrolled space as potential risks that are then
put under a general suspicion. Immigration and asylum, religious
organisations and political movements, ethnic minorities, foreign citizens
and transnational communities, workforce that is associated with security
risks are made targets of supervision and partially exclusion.
However, legislation that follows September 11 th takes on developments the
substance of which was already in place during the last 20 years (Paeffgen,
2002, p. 338) and which is also part of globalization of criminal law
allegedly following an aggressive policy of “legal imperialism”
(Schünemann, 2003) which is again fueled by neutralization of conflicts and
the elimination of controversial discourses from law making and policy
programming in the field of terrorism. As far as states did not respond to
September 11 th by way of enacting explicit anti-terrorist legislation, such
states nevertheless follow the trail which is characterized by control of
transnational crime, money laundering and immigration and which easily
can be re-labelled as control of terrorism. In particular within the framework
of the European Union past changes in immigration policies today turn out
to be relevant for terrorism control. Here, we find e.g. the directive to
establish Eurodac (in force since December 15 th , 2000). This directive
implements a system which should prevent asylum shopping in the
Schengen space by way of collecting systematically personal data and in
particular fingerprints (or in the future biometric information; Albrecht
2002). However, the system can easily be adjusted to control of terrorist or
extremist individuals or groups.
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