 Good afternoon, everybody. You're very welcome to the Institute of International European Affairs. We're delighted to be joined by Gilles de Kercov, EU counter-terrorism coordinator, whom I will introduce now. Just to remind everybody that to switch your phones to silent if you would, feel free to tweet. The comments at the beginning will be on the record and the Q&A afterwards will be subject to the Chatham House Rule. So we would encourage you to ask questions in due course. So let me introduce the speaker, first of all, who I understand learned English in Ireland some time ago. So we'll let you pass judgement in due course. So Gilles de Kercov is currently the EU's counter-terrorism coordinator position he's held since December 07. This position was established in 2004 after the adoption of the Declaration on Combatting Terrorism. In this capacity, he coordinates the work of the European Union in the field of counter-terrorism, maintains an overview of all the instruments at the Union's disposal, closely monitors the implementing of the EU counter-terrorism strategy. Previously, Mr de Kercov served as the director for justice and home affairs at the EU Council General Secretariat in 1995 to 2007 and served in various capacities in the Belgian government before then, including his Minister of Justice and Minister of Economic Affairs between 93 and 95. He is also currently a professor of European law at the Catholic University of Bluven, the Free University of Brussels and the St Louis University of Brussels and has written numerous books on European law, human rights, security and counter-terrorism. So the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot for the invitation and for the nice introduction. It's not only an honour to be invited by the institute, but it's a real pleasure for me to be back. As you said, I spent more than a month here in Dublin in 1971 to try to learn English, and if my English remains poor, it's not because the teacher was not good, it's just because I'm not... That's so gifted for foreign languages, but I do my best. And the second one is when I started working for the General Secretary of the Council, one of the first challenges we had was to answer a concern by the then Prime Minister, I think it was John Britton, of the murder of a journalist here in Dublin. And we asked him what to do, and we advised the then presidency, Irish presidency, to set up a high level group on organized crime. And that has really been the start of a lot of our work in justice and home affairs. And then I had the chance to see John Britton a lot more when he was chairing one of the working group of the Convention, which drafted the Constitutional Treaty. And I remember that I tried my best to convince him to move justice, what remained in the so-called third pillar into the first pillar, to move security into the community competence at the time. It took me a bit some efforts, but then he was completely convinced, and it changed completely the way we are working. And I will try to illustrate that even if the Lisbon Treaty is a bit... The mini-treaty, which keeps most of the content of the Constitutional Treaty, has made internal security a shared competence between the member states in the European Union. We've always, in recent years, described the role of the EU as being in support of the member states, quite modestly, not taking the lead. We are modestly providing money, adopting legislation, creating legal framework, setting up agencies in support of the member states. And I will try to explain in the 20, 25 minutes I have that in the last three years, we're no longer only in a support capacity. I think we have decided to be much more proactive for a reason, a simple reason that if you ask in the polls to EU citizens where they would like to see more Europe, they always put security, counter-terrorism, border control on top of their concern. One of the most recent Euro-Bahá methods was 82% of the people who are asked where they would like to see more Europe. And that message went through and was well understood by both the President of the Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, and the President of the European Council, Mr. Tusk. They have decided to launch a new concept, which they call the Security Union, when you look at the monetary union, that is quite ambitious. And the President of the Commission has appointed a full-time commissioner for security, Julian King, and I'm impressed by what we have done the last three years. It's quite impressive in terms of new legislation, new concept with boost or agency. Europe is now really involved, now in CT, counter-terrorism. So there is quite significant change, and I will try to illustrate that. But let me first start by a quick snapshot on the way I see the threat. No need to tell you how much it remains serious. In many member states, they still have a quite high level, even if Belgium reduced from 3 to 2. I think it's still serious in the UK, in France as well. And if you look at the most recent European report, the T-Site report, on 2017, its member states reported a total of 205 failed or completed terrorist attacks, i.e. a 45% increase compared to 2016. 68 people have been killed, 844 injured, 1,000 people arrested and so on. I could continue. It's really important and significant. But it's not just serious. What is worrying is that the threat is much more complex than it was on the day after 9-11. On the day after 9-11, in a way, life was quite easy. We had one enemy, EQ, struck like a multinational company. A few people, they were in the hundreds. No, we have a much more diverse threat. Many more groups with franchises and affiliated groups. Many more people were not in the hundreds anymore. We're in the thousands. This morning, going to the airport, listening to the radio, the chairman of the International Crisis Group was asked to comment on this and said we have to accept, we failed in a way. We have not been very good. We have not reduced the threat of terrorism. It's a bit of collective failure. And we have to ask ourselves, what did we do wrong? So the threat is much more diverse. And if you look at the source of threat we have now, you have homegrown, which we believe is the most serious threat. We have the legacy of the caliphate, the so-called returnies. We have still people detained, Europeans detained in Syria and Iraq. I'll come to that. We have more and more prison leavers, people who have been either radicalized in prison or have been convicted for terrorism and they have served their sentence. And we have, and I want to be clear on that, I don't believe it's a major problem, but some cases of refugees who are getting radicalized and attracted by these ideas. So let me say one or two words on these four or five categories. The first one, the homegrown in recent speech, Andrew Parker, the head of MI5 said, I see here a real shift. It's not just a spike after the four terrorist attacks in London and Manchester in 2017. It's people who are not linked to AQ or Daesh, who are not traveling, who have not traveled to Syria and Iraq. They just get inspired by this ideology and they are self-radicalized. We know the role of internet, we say word, the role of prison, the two major incubator of radicalization, but we have Salafi organization, radical preachers playing a role as well. The challenge here are first to the number. If I take only the three largest member states, the German, the French and the British state, they have identified something like 20,000 radical individuals at several stages of the process of radicalization, from the early stage up to the more violent stage. The challenge for the security services and the police is, of course, early detection. As early as we can detect signs of radicalization, we can provide non-security response. How do we do that? Many people in the room know that much better than I do, but community policing, we discuss at lunch, plays an important role. Train frontliners to detect these signs that may be social workers in schools and so on. Hotlines, when the French Ministers of Interior decided to have a hotline, I said, we'll never work. What surprised me, a lot of mothers called the state because they had exhausted all arguments so that the kids were not travelling to Syria and Iraq, and they were turning to the state. No and no, I understand our security services are even using big data analytics because by processing billions of data, you may discover or detect changing behaviors. So that's a challenge, but even more difficult, as I understand, is not just to detect some signs of radicalization, but more important is to determine what I call the tipping point because being radical is not a crime in itself. What is the problem? It's when someone radicals start preparing an attack. So he downloaded a tutorial on how to build a bomb. He goes to a shop to build the ingredients for building the bomb. And that is the big problem because in most of the recent terrorist attacks in Europe, all services, they had the data. It's not that they had not identified that someone was a radical, but they missed the tipping point. And the last one to criticize, because I know that it is extremely difficult to do that, but that will have some consequences that I will touch later on. And it's interesting when you read the latest version of Contest, the UK city strategy, there is a major shift, conceptual shift, where now they have decided, based on proposal, the Anderson report and so on, that MI5 should start sharing a little bit more the wholly intelligence at local level, up to, I don't know, even the private sector or NGO, because that's the only way to determine the tipping point. I find that quite interesting. So, homegrown. The second one, returnees. I call the legacy of the caliphate. You know, we've had up to 5,000 Europeans who went to Syria and Iraq. 2,500 have not returned yet. We have 1,100 who were killed and 1,500 who have already returned. So the 2,500, it's a lot. Maybe many of them have been killed but were not aware. The Battle of Mosul was very, very violent and there are many bodies that have been buried and they've not been identified. Some are still fighting. There is still a small dash of 2,000 to 3,000 fighters along the Euphrates Valley. Some managed to already leave for another hotspot, Afghanistan, the Sinai, probably other places, Southeast Asia. And so many detain. We believe we have a bit less, I would say around 2,000 fighters, 666 women and 1,400 children. And this is quite a challenge. So again, the challenge is first to spot them when they return. I think we have improved a lot in Europe. Starting with a systematic check on all citizens where they get out of the Schengen zone and they re-enter the Schengen zone before it was purely random. We have done a lot of progress in biometrics, in feeding the different database. I won't go into the detail. But I think we are in a better position to spot those who are returning. The second one is to bring them to justice, which raises the issue of getting access to evidence because you have to prove that someone was fighting alongside Daesh and not with the Free Syrian Army or whatever group. And most of the data, most of the evidence we have are digital. And getting a speedy and easy access to digital evidence is not an easy exercise because most of the data are stored, a lot in Ireland, by the way, but a lot are still stored in California, in a clothe somewhere there. And using MLA requests takes time, a year, in the best case. And in the worst scenario, if you want to get access to content, you have to abide by the false amendment to the US Constitution, which is completely stupid. It would be jihadists sending a WhatsApp message to another jihadist, an Irish, sending a WhatsApp message to another Irish to plan a terrorist attack in Ireland. If the WhatsApp message is stored in Palo Alto, you will have to abide by the false amendment, which requires what they call probable cause, which is much more demanding than what we know in Ireland we know on the continent. Three, assess dangerousness because when you cannot secure a conviction, you need to monitor the person and you can only monitor those you assess to be the most dangerous one because I'm told that to monitor someone 24-7 takes, what, 20 to 25 staff and at least in my country, I think we can monitor two or three maximum. And five, and we'll come to that, disengage. Whatever the term, it's jihadicalization, resistance, as they say in London now, rehabilitation or reintegration, we'll come to that. So that's the second category. The third one is, and I mentioned that, those who are detained in Syria and Iraq. What do we do with those held by the SDF, the Kurdish fighters in the Kurdish part of Syria? There is a war, it's not an official state, but they hold a series of Europeans and they won't keep them forever. So that's a question. Do we want to bring them back in Europe? Many of them say they are not very keen. All the more, especially when they don't have enough evidence to secure a conviction because they don't want to monitor them 24-7. And those who are detained now are the most dangerous ones. You can think that the first wave, some among the first in the first wave were probably driven by different ideas and fighting against Assad was probably one of the ideas. But the latest contingent, it's probably more hardcore jihadists with bad ideas. So what do we do with this one? And the second category I just alluded to is women and children. Women, our members say, are more and more reluctant and they see women like men because what we have understood from investigation is that more women than we thought were engaged in religious police, in logistics, in support in any forms, on internet and so on, propaganda, were not that nice. We don't trust wives locked in an apartment waiting that the husband was coming back from the battlefield. And children. And children, it is an issue. 1,400 children, it's not peanuts. Many were born there, nearly 600. We have to protect children. They have nothing to do with the caliphate and they have the citizenship of one of our members says. So what do we do? The Convention on the Right of the Children foresees that a child should remain with the mother. It's in the chest of the child. So member states are asking whether they should bring the mother back but what I said about women. So this is an issue we'll have to address at some stage. Four categories, the prison levers. Because of lack of evidence in many cases or because they've just got low sentences, many terrorists will have served their sentence in the coming months and will be released. And most likely, they will be very radical. Unless we have developed effective de-radicalization, disengagement program in prison but very few member states have really found the silver bullet here. But on top of those who were convicted for terrorism we have a high number of people who just got radicalized in prison. They were convicted for small crime or petty crime or serious crime and we've seen this process because in prison it's a quite tough environment. Many people just, they are born again. So they convert in a way. They were probably slow, low Muslim, low practice and they discovered that radical Islam helped them in prison. First because you joined the dominant group and that helps to get violence or because it helps you to regain self-esteem. And this very black and white ideology may help you to rebuild yourself. And so if you look at the figures in France the Minister of Justice said that they will have 450 people who will leave prison, 400 convicted for normal crime and 50 for terrorism by end of 2019. Quite a lot. So how will we assess the risk and what to do with someone who has served his or her sentence? Normally they are free. So should we impose additional measures like on sexual offenders, some regular reporting to the police when you want to go abroad, when you want to change your dummy sign or should they have an electronic bracelet or we probably need to invent something. If we believe we have assessed that those leaving prison will be quite dangerous. And finally refugee. I said very, very marginal number but we see some Salafi organization try to recruit in some of the member states refugees because they are vulnerable. You don't integrate in German nor in Belgian society overnight. It's a long and painful process. So that's a bit the variety, the diversity of the source of threat. On top of it we still have the two organizations. What will happen to Daesh? Will they be something like Daesh 2.0? They will have to reinvent themselves. They, I think, still quite some money at the conference hosted by President Macron a month ago in Paris on terrorist financing. The French intelligence service said that they've assessed they were, they collected up to 2 billion but they've probably invested half a billion in the real economy. So they have a flow of regular money be it in farms in Iraq or real estate in Istanbul or whatever but they have money. And when you have money you can do a lot. And they still have franchises and affiliated groups. So they may evolve like Al-Qaeda after the operation in Afghanistan, after 9-11, a weak center and still very effective affiliated groups. We don't know. And they have groups in Libya, in the Sinai, in Afghanistan, in Yemen, in Southeast Asia and still in Nigeria with Boko Haram. That's first. The second one is that we have a bit forgot AQ. And AQ is still around. It's not just because we've seen the rise of Daesh that AQ had all of a sudden disappeared. In Syria, HTS, Ayat-Tahir Al-Sham or a new group called, I don't remember, it's quite complicated. It's a formal franchise of AQ operating in Syria. And they are attracting a lot of fighters disillusioned by the geopolitical development there. AQEP in Yemen, AQ I am called Jinnim in the Sahel, Al-Shabaab in Afghanistan, less than some people suggest, but still active. And I am interested by an ID floated by one of the best experts of Al-Qaeda, Ali Soufan, a former FBI officer who said probably we could see a merge between the two. Why? Because the three reasons why they split when Al-Qaeda in Iraq split into Jabhat al-Uthra and Daesh have nearly disappeared. The first one was an ego problem between Baghdadi and Al-Zawiri. Al-Zawiri is older and older and Baghdadi is still alive. We heard this week that his son has been killed but he's not in good shape to say the least. Second, we have the problem of the caliphate. For Al-Qaeda, the caliphate is the long-term goal. For Daesh, it was a very short-term objective. But there is no caliphate anymore. So it's not an issue anymore. And the third reason is the use of violence to promote and impose your ideas. I think Al-Qaeda learned from their mistake. It's not by beheading people that you will win the hearts and minds. And I think Daesh might go around that process as well. And that's why you see Moe Moe Hamza Ben Laden, the son of Usama Ben Laden, Moe Moe Kuminik on the propaganda. And that would be a good idea for them to go that way. My last, the ultimate point is what I call the Black Swan. How is it possible that when the Americans left Iraq, when Obama decided to withdraw the troops in 2011, AQI was nearly destroyed. And the money they put on the head of the leader of AQI at the time was nearly nothing. Three years later, Baghdadi in Mosul proclaimed the caliphate. And they attracted 40,000 fighters from 100 countries in the world. How is it that in three years time we have seen the rise of the most powerful terrorist organization ever and nobody has seen this? It's like the Black Swan. We have not been that good to see that. It may repeat. That's the problem. Are we prepared to identify much earlier the Black Swan? A point that I will develop quickly later on, linked to the threat in a way is the unfortunate possibility for a lone actor to use high-tech tool to mount an attack with catastrophic consequences. And I don't want to scare you at all. It's probably science fiction for the time being. But miniaturization, only 28 grams of explosives are enough to blow up a plane to don a drum boat. Drones. The nightmare of the security service is to see returnees bringing back the expertise they gain in Iraq and Syria with chemical stuff and drones. They use drones. So you put chemical on a drone on a football stadium and don't need to develop more. Cyber. There is nothing for the time being as cyber-terrorism. They use cyber more to propagate their stupid ideas and to communicate to raise money. By the way, they strange to see that when you put someone on a sanctioned list his bank account is frozen but a person can keep a Facebook account to do crowdfunding and collect money, Bitcoins and so on. That's another. There is nothing like cyber-terrorism but if you have a lot of money it should be possible to go to the suburbs of Moscow or other places and hire a geek or several good guys, expert in cyber or to go in the dark web and buy what is called a zero day and a zero day it's a vulnerability in a software like WannaCry which was detect by the NSA and leaked through WikiLeaks and used by cyber hackers and artificial intelligence and again there is a huge potential for these disruptive technologies and we should use them one idea I have for instance is to use blockchain to design much less expensive more robust ways for the diaspora to send their money back in their home country instead of using Havala or paying the fees of Western Union. So voilà and finally there are other groups than Daesh and the EQ, we have on a terrorist list organization like the PKK which is a very serious concern for the Turks. We put the military branch of the Hezbollah on the terrorist list as well. And it's a question I want to raise here and I raised during the lunch in some of our members says there is a concern on the rise of far right as well and in France they arrested a group of far right extremist last week and they were planning to kill Muslim refugees and so on. And the risk is to see the two feeding each other in a way far right and on the other hand radical Islamist each other. So one word on the response and then in a telegraphic term I know I have to speed up on the challenges. As I said the last three is after the attack Charlie Hebdo in Paris we've really boosted our work and the heads of state and government ask us to work more in three main direction more on the repressive side which means a definition of terrorism, how to improve the collection of evidence especially digital evidence I mean fighting against the financing of terrorism protection of soft targets so that Berlin to lose and so on does not repeat protection of critical infrastructure reducing availability of firearms was still possible two years ago to buy Kalashnikov in the centre of Brussels in an hour and a half for 300 bucks nothing so that's in border control border management more on the repressive side and I would say a word because that's a real challenge how can we in a way understand the process of radicalization if we ever will and what can we do about that can we interrupt this process and find the right policy it's a lot about radicalization in prison it's a lot about internet important for Ireland it's a lot about probably the ideology itself we're sometimes a bit afraid to raise the issue of radical Islam because we don't want to criticize a religion and link up a religion and terrorism but there is a sort of hijacking of Islam for terrorism purposes and we have to address that and develop and mainstream more prevent in a lot of other policies and during the lunch someone said we need a whole of government but a whole of government approach how can we mobilize more education culture sport access to employment and so on and the final basket of policy where we have been asked to do a lot more is on the external side how can we develop very strong contenders in partnership with all our neighbors why concentrate on the neighbors first because they need a lot of assistance and second because it's our first line of defense from Morocco to Turkey including the western Balkans they are all faced with serious problem of radicalization they need to enrich their city policy which is often too much repressive and not integrating enough a whole of society a whole of government approach not enough prevent and we do a lot and so I spend more than half of my time visiting all these countries one by one and trying to see what they need and how we can help maybe that's I know but just in telegraphic terms that could be the Q&A in a way the challenge that I see the first one is just the one I mentioned prevent can we design effective disengagement program for the time being we've not developed enough this we've built on internet we've done a lot through a voluntary approach with internet companies so that they remove unlawful content should we move to a next step which would be a legislation three do we want to address the issue of Salafism in Europe again, sensitive issue but it's on the rise and that is a concern in several of our member states the second one is information sharing we've done a lot in two of the three aspects of what the Americans call an information sharing environment collect more share more but the third leg equally if not more important say analyze better so collect more there we have the issue of privacy and both the European Parliament and the Court of Justice are more and more restrictive on the type of data that we can collect with collected data on passengers the PNR financial data, internet data and so forth but we probably need a lot more but we are confronted with the data protection limit the second one is encryption the internet company after the Snowden leaks have developed very sophisticated encrypted system which makes the life of our security service much more difficult so that's on the collection on the sharing the good news our member states have done a major improvement and are now feeding populating and using the different database much better than they were three years ago so that's a very good news we still have an issue about the link between the security services as a group which is called the CTG and Europol, agency for law enforcement cooperation and if we want to build some links between the two but the third leg is equally if not more important is how to analyze the data that we have collected and we have shared because as I said in most instances the service had the data but they didn't analyze the data properly. President Macron launched the idea of creating an European Intel Academy which I think is a very good idea and the French are now the DGSC the French security service recruiting other profiles ethnologue sociologue, linguist IT specialist because on question as complicated as this one you need to have different angle different sort of analysis and I think we need, all of us need to do that a lot more so that's the third the third one and I stop I take we need to assess better the huge potential of all these disruptive technologies but also use them positively but assess the the interestness for a culture of public private partnership we're not doing enough on that side and finally with all external partners we have a lot of issues Brexit what will the consequence of Brexit be I don't want to discuss it it's in the hands of a very able negotiator the US we've developed a very strong transatlantic relationship but we have a lot of tension in many respect NATO trade and so on will it expand to security and foreign policy as a whole because probably if and I come back to what I said at the outset if we have not been that successful it's probably because we have not done enough on several aspects development solving conflict promoting the rule of law, promoting human rights and so on so I'm sorry I've been much beyond the 25 minutes but I'm more than happy to answer any question you may have