UK facing EU security shutout after Brexit

GCHQ stresses importance of intelligence
sharing as EU delivers wake-up call

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In a brutal assessment of any future security relationship, the
EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, said the UK would be
locked out of bloc’s pooled policing databases, would lose access
to the European Arrest Warrant and no longer have a role in
managing agencies such as Europol and Eurojust.

Speaking in Vienna, Barnier said: EU security cooperation was
based on “trust”, but added: “This trust doesn’t fall from the sky,
there is no magic wand. This trust is founded on an ecosystem… If
you leave this ecosystem you lose the benefits of this
cooperation.”

Security cooperation has long been believed to be Britain’s
trump card in the Brexit negotiations. The UK currently shares
information directly with the likes of Germany and France who value
this relationship because of the scope and size of GCHQ, one of the
biggest surveillance agencies in the world, but mainly because it
is so closely intertwined with the US National Security Agency.

Speaking on a visit to Nato headquarters, the director of the
surveillance agency GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming, said Britain had supplied
key information to help break up terrorist operations in four
European countries in the last year and stressed other European
countries had benefited from classified intelligence shared by the
UK on cyber-threats.

According to The Guardian “it is unprecedented for a UK
intelligence chief, especially one from GCHQ who until recently
were seldom seen or heard in public, to intervene in a diplomatic
negotiation in such a way”. The paper says his comments “can be
seen as a direct riposte to EU chiefs” as the UK “upped the ante”
in the growing row over post-Brexit security.

But while the EU has indicated it would be willing to
renegotiate certain existing security procedures such as expedited
extradition, the exchange of security information, judicial
cooperation and measures to tackle money laundering and terrorism
financing, Brussels’ wider intransigence has surprised many in
Westminster.

The Express says Barnier’s speech took aim at
British Brexiteers and their ‘red lines’, “reinforcing the EU’s
tough negotiating stance of not allowing the UK to cherry pick any
elements of its member states’ so-called membership benefits”.

One major stumbling block to a new security arrangement is the
EU’s insistence that any cooperation with the UK would be
conditional on Britain remaining subject to the European Court of
Human Rights and its convention.

On Monday, the European Commission, released a series of slides
with several demands for a post-Brexit security deal. The document
demanded a so-called “guillotine clause”, threatening to nullify
any EU-UK security partnership if Britain leaves the ECHR.

The Daily Telegraph says that Theresa May was
reportedly planning to argue for Britain to quit the ECHR in her
2020 manifesto before she called an early election last year “but
this move could tie her and future governments’ hands”.

It now appears her commitment to withdraw from EU institutions
including the ECHR and European Court of Justice make it impossible
for the prime minister to achieve her goal of keeping the UK in
Europol and maintaining access to the European arrest warrant after
Brexit.