EUs grensekontroll er illusorisk. Så lite som en av 100 reisende blir sjekket mot EUs terrorliste. Det gjør at jihadister fra Syria kan reise inn og ut av EU med lav risiko for å bli oppdaget.
I tillegg kommer alle migrantene som har strømmet til Europa og som bare har fått en helt overflatisk registrering, hvis de i det hele tatt er blitt registrert.
Wanted terrorists carrying European passports can be waved through border checks with nothing more than a cursory visual inspection of their travel documents, sources have said.
And EU officials say they have no idea if any of the thousands of refugees currently making their way into Europe are being scanned against the watchlist.
EUs innenriksministre skal fredag diskutere responstiltak på Paris-terroren. Frankrike vil ha rett til å suspendere Schengen og innføre grensekontroll når det måtte ønske. Det vil også at passasjeregistre skal overleveres myndighetene ikke bare for utenlandsfly, men også innen EU og at det skal gjelde også for ferger og jernbane. Opplysningene om de overfaltiske kontrollene av reisende inn til EU, kan bare styrke slike krav.
Fritt frem
Vil de andre innenriksministrene våge å avslå Frankrikes krav, når de hører at:
On average, just 10-20 per cent of EU nationals travelling from outside the continent have their passports checked against a Schengen-wide database designed to catch foreign fighters returning from Syria and Iraq.
At least three of the eight known Paris terrorists are believed to have fought in Syria before returning to commit Friday’s atrocity. All those identified so far are believed to be EU citizens.
Ayoub el-Khazzani, the terrorist behind the botched gun attack on a Thalys high speed train this summer, was also on the SIS list but is believed to have travelled to Syria and criss-crossed Europe with impunity.
The Schengen Information System (SIS) watchlist contains the details of 4,000 foreign fighters, as well as hundreds of thousands of stolen passports, suspect cars, wanted criminals and missing people. Passports of people travelling from outside the continent are scanned against a computer database flag up those who need to be stopped before they can enter the free-travel zone on the continent.
Officials said the proportion of European passports cross-referenced against SIS ranges between countries from one per cent to one hundred per cent. The average across the EU is around 10-20 per cent.
“Abaaoud, or another jihadist, has good odds working in their favour,” an EU diplomat admitted.
But EU officials are resistant to a fundamental review of the rules because the right to pass in and out the continent unhindered “is a part of free movement”, they argue.
Under EU rules, all non-European passport holders are meant to be checked against SIS. However, this is not taking place. Only the “majority” of airports taking commercial flights from outside Europe are applying the SIS checks.
European officials in charge of the system admit they have no idea how many – if any – of the thousands of refugees flooding into Greece and Hungary are scanned against SIS. There is little chance of someone who crosses into Europe over a rural border being scanned, they admit.
“We are clear what the rules say and what states should be doing .They are not always applied in the way we would have wanted,” said an official.
Refugees are meant to be logged in EURODAC, a fingerprint database used for processing asylum claims, which police can access. However, fewer than one in ten migrants in some areas of Greece are thought to have been registered this summer, although that rate has since improved.
Even then, EURODAC cannot “talk” to SIS, meaning that even if a suspected jihadists did register themselves as refugees on the Greek islands, the system would not flag them up as a threat.
In a further weakness, SIS does not allow for a suspect traveller’s fingerprints to be searched against a biometric database. That gives an advantage to those travelling with fake passports.