EUROPOL PROBLEMS – THE ROLE OF EUROPOL IN THE FIGHT AGAINS TERRORISM

Abstract

After numerous terrorist attacks against European states at the beginning of 21st century, the question arose if the European union is capable to respond to this security threat. In that purpose Europol was created as an EU agency in order to combat terrorism and organized crime. This paper will analize the main upsides and downsides of Europol’s functioning as the counter-terrorism agency. The main activity of Europol is coordination of information exchange between member states and national police and security agencies. The biggest success of Europol so far is creating data bases which contain large collection of information on terrorism threats to EU states. On the other hand, there are multiple obstacles that Europol faces, like distrust that memeber states have towards Europol, national police agancies refusing to share information and political structure of Europol. This police agency is unique because it is made by political will or „top-down“. That is the reason why Europol faces many bureaucratic problems, like in the case when Europol was working without chosen Director because of political disputes inside EU. All these problems indicate that Europol will stay within its current mandate and that trust from member states will arguably further dissipate.