Discussions on asylum and cyber crime

Last Friday, Cecilia Malmström participated in a seminar in Stockholm. The future EU asylum and migration policy, which should have been agreed on by the year 2012, was the subject of the day. Among the questions from the audience were issues such as circular migration, labour migration, the future demographic challenge for the EU, the difficult situation in Greece, and the need for better EU cooperation with countries outside of the Union.

Cecilia Malmström then travelled on to Sälen, where she was the keynote speaker on the Folk and Försvar security policy conference on Sunday. In her speech, she spoke about the EU Internal Security Strategy that she presented last autumn, where cyber crime and cyber security is one of the prioritised areas for EU's security policy the coming years.

"Within the EU, security policy has too long been following a silo mentality, where every security threat has been assessed in isolation", said Cecilia Malmström. She continued: "One of the strongest arguments in favour of the EU needing a broader strategy on security issues is the Internet, which is a new arena for both organised crime and terrorism, and which – if used maliciously – also can lead to great security gaps and humanitarian disasters."

During Cecilia Malmström's first year as EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, she proposed a Directive on fighting large scale IT attacks. In her speech in Sälen on Sunday, she also called for better cooperation within the EU as well as between the EU and the United States and Nato.