DPP backs judicial co-operation in EU

Ireland should opt in to EU decisions making evidence more freely transferable between member states, according to Director of Public Prosecutions James Hamilton.

Mr Hamilton told a seminar on anti-terrorism that notwithstanding the Government's decision to opt out of EU cross-border crime-fighting measures, it would be unfortunate if a vital prosecution could not proceed because appropriate co-operation measures had not been adopted in the area of justice and home affairs.

The DPP said he fundamentally disagreed with the idea that judicial co-operation within the EU was made impossible by the divide between civil law used in much of Continental Europe and common law systems practised in the UK and Ireland.

"Some common lawyers seem to see a constant struggle by civil law countries to impose their value on an unwilling common law world. I have to say that I believe this way of looking at things is completely unreal," he told the seminar organised by the Irish Centre for European Law and the Academy of European Law.

Fine Gael claimed Mr Hamilton's views threw new light on the Government's opt-out decision and called on the Minister for Justice to pay close attention to his remarks when the decision is reviewed in 2010.

In his speech, Mr Hamilton said there was a great variety of law in both systems within the broad civil law tradition, as well as a great deal of cross-fertilisation between different systems.

The Government's decision to review its opt-out from justice and home affairs issues was an important one, and must be done in a comprehensive manner. A review should identify the non-negotiable features of our existing system and identify any threat to those features. "It is not sufficient for us simply to say that something is incompatible with the way we do things and leave it at that," he said.

Rather than defending every last element of common law at all costs, we should proceed with a case-by-case examination of the changes proposed. He said there was a need to ensure that laws were in place to enable international co-operation against terrorism. There now existed a substantial body of law that made criminal almost every conceivable form of terrorist activity.

If a terrorist offence was conceived, planned and carried out entirely within Ireland we would have ample legal means to deal with the matter. The real problem was that virtually all terrorist activities are transnational, and no one country on its own could take the necessary measures to counter terrorism.

Mr Hamilton said it could be argued that the numbers of Irish people killed in the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings or the Omagh bombing of 1998 were greater proportionally than the American victims of 9/11.

However, this missed the point that the latter attack was probably the largest single terrorist atrocity carried out in modern times. The ruthlessness of the 9/11 attackers with their motive of returning the world to a state of religious intolerance marked the event out as a milestone.

Ivan Gelberd, of Europol's counter-terrorism unit, told the conference there were 498 terrorist attacks in the EU last year. Only three were carried out by Islamist groups while the majority (424) were perpetrated by nationalist or separatist groups, mostly in France and Spain.

TJ McIntyre, chairman of Digital Rights Ireland, said the history of data retention law in Ireland had been marked by stealth, bad faith and contempt for the democratic process. The European debate was more open.