1
Intelligence services in
the EU-28: a diverse landscape
UN good practices on mandate of
intelligence services
Practice 1. Intelligence services play an important role
in protecting national security and upholding the rule
of law. Their main purpose is to collect, analyse and disseminate information that assists policymakers and other
public entities in taking measures to protect national security. This includes the protection of the population and
their human rights.
Practice 5. Intelligence services are explicitly prohibited
from undertaking any action that contravenes the constitution or international human rights law. These prohibitions extend not only to the conduct of intelligence services on their national territory but also to their activities
abroad.
UN, Human Rights Council (2010), Report of the Special Rapporteur Martin
Scheinin
The organisation of intelligence communities within the
EU-28 has not fundamentally changed since publication
of the 2015 FRA report, and FRA’s subsequent fieldwork
research did not address this topic. This chapter
therefore reiterates some of the earlier report’s main
findings, and provides updates where warranted.
This report uses generic terminology, referring to
‘intelligence services’ for both ‘intelligence services’
that focus on foreign threats and ‘security services’ that
focus on domestic threats.38 The report focuses only
on these entities’ intelligence collection, analysis and
dissemination functions, and not on any other activities
involved in directly countering and disrupting threats.39
38
39
See Cousseran, J.-C. and Hayez, P. (2015), p. 41 and UN,
Human Rights Council (2010), Report of the Special
Rapporteur Martin Scheinin, p. 4.
Born, H. and Wills, A. (eds.) 2012.
Annex 2 lists the existing intelligence services in the
EU Member States. The table does not list Member State
assessment and coordination bodies, such as the United
Kingdom Joint Intelligence Committee; the Department
for Security Information (DIS) in Italy; or the national
intelligence and fight against terrorism coordinator
(coordonnateur national du renseignement et de la
lutte contre le terrorisme) in France, who is a part of
the French intelligence community.40
By law, all EU Member States regulate the organisation
of their country’s intelligence services. Almost all have
established at least two different bodies for conducting
civil and military intelligence. In practice, the line
separating the mandates of civil and military services
is increasingly blurred;41 many digital techniques – such
as the geolocation of mobile devices – are used by both.
Since this report is concerned with surveillance and not
with wider national security intelligence gathering, it
focuses – to the extent possible – on civil intelligence
services. It does not cover the latter’s work on military
targets or the work of purely military intelligence
services, given that they fall outside the scope of the
EP resolution that sparked this research.
In some Member States, civil intelligence services are
further divided into separate services – often with
a domestic or foreign mandate. In some cases, these
separate services have access to common platforms for
technical and digital intelligence gathering operations.
Moreover, some Member States grant the power to
conduct intelligence operations to units that are not
part of the civil intelligence services and that specialise
40 France, Defence Code (Code de la Défense), Art. D 1122–8–1.
See also France, CNCTR (2016), p. 33 and France, DPR &
CNCTR (2017), p. 13.
41 See Council of Europe (2016), p. 61; Cousseran, J.-C. and
Hayez, P. (2015), p. 30.
27