EU calls emergency meeting on terror response

EU justice and interior ministers will hold an emergency meeting “as soon as possible” to try to coordinate a European response to terrorism in the wake of Tuesday’s attacks in Brussels.

Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European commissioner in charge of home affairs issues, said Wednesday that the EU needs to “react immediately” and he had asked countries to convene for the meeting “maybe within the next days.”

“A threat towards Europe needs a European response,” Avramopoulos told reporters. “We cannot keep learning the hard way. [As] the events in Brussels show … we absolutely need more coordination and more information and intelligence sharing.”

Avramopoulos criticized EU countries for not doing enough to share intelligence in the fight against terrorism and urged governments to strengthen Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency.

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“If everything we had decided last year had been fully implemented by member states in a spirit of coordination and cooperation, we might have confronted this situation in a more efficient way,” Avramopoulos said. “It is very important to stick together, to work together.”

However the commissioner played down any suggestion he would put a controversial revamp of airport security measures on the agenda of the ministerial meetings, saying the issue remained a “competence of national authorities” and that he had full confidence in governments’ ability to implement security measures.