Virkkunen unveiled a Commission proposal in Strasbourg Tuesday to give law enforcement more resources. The strategy document proposed to increase staff at EU border agency Frontex to 30,000 personnel. It is currently planned to have 10,000 standing corps personnel by 2027.
The strategy, which is a broad plan rather than a set of concrete legislative proposals, follows two other recent proposals on defense and preparedness that showed how the EU is increasingly taking on security as its responsibility.
The Commission also called for the EU’s police agency Europol to be given more resources and to be tasked with fighting hybrid threats.
Hybrid attacks exist in a gray zone between criminal and state activity and aim to destabilize societies by targeting critical infrastructure with physical or cyberattacks or by sowing fear and confusion through information campaigns. Russia has bombarded Europe with such attacks since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. A senior NATO figure said last December that they could soon cause mass casualties.
Under the plan, law enforcement agencies would also be given greater access to data.
Henna Virkkunen unveiled a Commission proposal in Strasbourg to give law enforcement more resources. | Nicolas Tucat/Getty Images
Many law enforcement authorities are “lagging very much behind … when it comes to digital tools,” Virkkunen said. “More and more, crimes are connected to technologies, and digital platforms are used … I think that our police and law enforcement need more tools to tackle crime in [the] digital world.”
However, these plans are likely to upset privacy advocates. Proposed EU legislation to combat child sexual abuse material online has long been stalled because EU member countries disagree on whether private messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal should be forced to hand over people’s conversations to the police.
Any attempt to do the same via other legal mechanisms may run into similar problems, though Virkkunen insisted that people’s privacy will be protected.