STEVEN ERLANGER and KIMIKO DE FREYTAS-TAMURA
As France and Belgium Strengthen Security, a Classic Debate Arises
PARIS — Shocked by the carnage of the Paris attacks, France and Belgiummoved aggressively on Thursday to strengthen the hand of their security forces, pushing Europe more deeply into a debate that has raged in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001: how to balance counterterrorism efforts and civil liberties.
With their populations stunned and nervous and political pressure growing on the right, the French and Belgian governments made it clear that, for now, they would put protecting their citizens ahead of other considerations.
With time, the United States has moved to ease some elements of the U.S.A.Patriot Act, passed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. It has also strengthened oversight of intelligence agencies and of mass domestic surveillance in the wake of the revelations by Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor for the National Security Agency who leaked documents about surveillance.
But European nations battered by terrorism are moving in the other direction. Those nations include France, which has suffered multiple attacks this year;Belgium, where many of the Paris attackers lived or grew up; and Britain, which has thwarted a number of plots in recent years. Each is updating and strengthening government power while debating further controls over passport-free travel within continental Europe.
Since Friday’s attacks on Paris, France has aggressively used emergency powers, for example, to round up potential terrorism suspects across the country in an effort to disrupt any further plots.
Finding the right balance between individual rights and antiterrorism measures has grown more complex in the 14 years since the United States was struck by Al Qaeda, in part because of the pervasiveness of digital technology and the ensuing questions about personal privacy. But in the days after the Paris attacks, there has been relatively little reflection about the trade-offs as the nations most affected, France and Belgium, rushed to put new security measures in place and alter their legal and constitutional structures to give government more flexibility in dealing with threats.
As Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France warned darkly on Thursday of the possibility of chemical and biological attacks, France’s National Assembly voted, 551 to 6 with one abstention, to extend for three months a national state of emergency imposed after the attacks in Paris by the Islamic State, which killed 129 people and wounded 352.
“The state of emergency, it’s true, justifies certain temporary restrictions on liberties,” Mr. Valls said. “But resorting to this, it’s to give us every chance to fully restore these liberties.”
In Belgium, Prime Minister Charles Michel said he would rush through legal changes to make it easier to capture, try and punish suspected terrorists operating there. He also said he would seek constitutional changes to extend the length of time suspects can be held by the police without the filing of charges to 72 hours, from 24.
His plan calls for the imprisonment of jihadists returning to Belgium from overseas, and would require anyone deemed a threat to wear an ankle bracelet. The plan would also ban the anonymous sale of telephone SIM cards that allow terrorists to hide their identities; would remove restrictions on what times of day the police are permitted to conduct raids on terrorism suspects; and would allow the authorities to arrest or expel religious figures “who preach hatred.”
Mr. Michel also wants to require all passengers traveling on high-speed trains as well as airplanes to register their identities before departure.
Jan Techau, the director of Carnegie Europe, a research organization based in Brussels, said he saw the reactions as perfectly natural.
“The home front is the field of political activity now — it will all be about homeland security,” he said. “There is a sense that the authorities are no longer in control, and it’s a clear attempt by authorities to regain some trust.”
But advocates for civil liberties warned against governments going too far, and suggested that European nations had to be particularly careful that the measures they were taking were not aimed at one class of citizens: Muslims.
Officials at Human Rights Watch in Belgium cautioned on Thursday that the authorities should ensure such measures did not lead to indiscriminate roundups or unnecessary restrictions on freedom of speech, movement and religion.
“Like every nation, Belgium has a responsibility to protect its people from attacks, but it should not trample basic rights in the process,” said Letta Tayler, a senior terrorism and counterterrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Whenever a country is attacked or threatened, there is a danger that governments will overreact in an effort to make people secure.”
The French emergency bill, which the French Senate is expected to approve on Friday, extends the powers of a 1955 emergency law to allow the dissolution of radical groups running mosques and other places of prayer; the blocking of websites and social media that glorify or incite terrorism; and the use, in certain cases, of electronic tagging for those placed under house arrest.
It is the first time since the 1955 law was passed that a national state of emergency has been declared. France is already being patrolled by heavily armed soldiers, and now police officers who are off duty will be allowed to carry firearms and use them if they wear an armband identifying themselves as police.
On Wednesday, the French authorities said they had carried out more than 414 raids across the country, arrested 64 people and placed another 118 under house arrest.
Under the emergency, the authorities are permitted to conduct raids and make arrests without first obtaining a warrant. But as soon as someone is arrested or property is seized, the regular legal system kicks in. Suspects in terrorism cases are already allowed to be held without charge for up to six days.
In the United States, even in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, raids on that scale would have created a storm of criticism, but the French, only 10 months after Islamist radicals attacked the newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, have generally accepted the crackdown as necessary.
Mr. Hollande has also called for enshrining the state of emergency law in France’s Constitution, making it easier to declare such a state for longer periods of time without resorting to the more drastic options currently available in the Constitution.
Mr. Hollande also wants to make it easier to expel foreigners deemed to be a security threat; to revoke the French nationality of dual citizens, even those born in France, if they are convicted of terrorism-related offenses; and to close radical mosques.
France had already moved last summer to strengthen and modernize laws governing electronic surveillance after the attacks in January. Laws passed by large majorities gave broad legal authority for the state to snoop on citizens. Some civil liberties groups were vocally opposed, with Amnesty International saying June’s law took France “a step closer to a surveillance state,” while some called it a “Patriot Act à la Française.”
In Belgium, the call for broad new powers came after the government was stung by criticism that it had failed to act aggressively enough to identify and stop plots being planned on its soil. Mr. Michel also vowed a crackdown on Molenbeek, the Brussels district that has bred so many jihadists and harbored others.
As in France, many Belgians said that while the measures were drastic, they were prepared to give up some of their personal freedoms in return for security.
Belgium has been so shaken by the Paris attacks that there is a broad agreement that something needs to be done, said Steven Blockmans, an analyst at the Center for European Policy Studies based in Brussels. There is a consensus about the need to strengthen law enforcement, intelligence agencies and local governments, he said.
Mr. Michel’s moves are a partial vindication for the right-wing New Flemish Alliance, which has been calling for these measures for years, Mr. Blockmans said. The interior minister, Jan Jambon, who is a member of the party, recently said that Molenbeek needed to be “flushed out.”
Belgium has looser gun control laws than France but stricter controls on surveillance, which the new measures would loosen. For example, the authorities can intercept telephone conversations only if there is a strong suspicion that the targets are terrorists, said Jelle Van Buuren, a lecturer in counterterrorism at Leiden University. The surveillance cannot be extended to people who may be accomplices or have minor roles, he said.
Bart Tommelein, Belgium’s federal secretary in charge of privacy, said that the restrictions on privacy would only apply to terrorism suspects.
“If we are talking about suspected terrorists and people who have committed such crimes, then privacy doesn’t exist,” he said. “So for people who go to Syria, or return from Syria, that border can be crossed, they lose that right,” but others will not.
It was not the government’s intention to “put everyone in a database, but to target and put people suspected of engaging in terrorist activity in a database,” he said, and he insisted, “We won’t place security above freedom.”
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