Leaving the European Union could make it harder for British police to fight crime and terrorism, the head of the EU law enforcement agency has said.
Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, said leaving the EU meant the UK would become “a second-tier member of our club” and risked losing access to a vital European security database used by British police every day.
Brexit “has the potential to harm the UK’s ability to fight terrorism and crime, because of the extent to which police co-operation information systems and other capabilities in the EU have become embedded in the [British] police community and, to a lesser extent, the intelligence community”.
Wainwright, a former MI5 analyst who was born in Carmarthen, has led Europol since 2009. The agency has about 940 staff working to combat cross-border crime including terrorism, money laundering and people smuggling.
Asked about the likely consequences of Brexit, Wainwright told the Guardian that any alternative police co-operation arrangement would be only “partially as good” for Britain. “There will be a negative impact, it is just a question of how big or small. It is really about damage limitation,” he said.
“Britain, I am sure, would negotiate some form of access to Europol in the same way as Norway and Iceland, so they would become a second-tier member of our club – still useful but not, for example, having direct access to our database, not being able to lead any of our operational projects, not having the influence in our organisation that they do at the moment.”
Security has been a key battleground in the referendum campaign. Wainwright recently accused Nigel Farage of making false claims after the Ukip leader claimed EU migration policy had brought 5,000 Isis-inspired terrorists to Europe.
He said: “I am often misquoted as saying there are 5,000 terrorists running around Europe. There are not. There are 5,000 that have gone out. We think around a third of them have come back, and of those the majority do not pose any terrorist threat.
“That still gives rise to a very substantial number of terrorists [and] we are facing a very serious threat.”
Wainwright is also at odds with the retired spy chief Richard Dearlove, who has claimed that Brexit would not damage UK security. Dearlove, who led MI6 between 1999 and 2004, said Brussels had “little or nothing to do with the crucial practical business of counter-terrorism and counter-espionage”.
Wainwright said EU police co-operation had become “an important third pillar” for British security over the past decade, alongside intelligence links with European and US security services. “Take any one of those pillars away and of course it has the potential to negatively impact the fight against terrorism and serious crime.”
He said British police used the EU’s Schengen information system every day to check for leads about criminal suspects.
The Schengen information system (SIS) is a vast database of 64m pieces of information (known as alerts), used by 29 European countries. Most of the alerts relate to passport and identity records, but the database also includes information on 35,000 criminal suspects, 88,000 missing people and nearly 500,000 non-EU citizens denied entry to Europe.
The UK, which is not a member of the EU’s passport-free Schengen zone, gained access to the database in April last year after negotiating a special deal.
Brexit campaigners say the UK could negotiate new security agreements outside the EU, but Wainwright warned of legal and practical difficulties. He said it could take years to negotiate the “historic first” of access to the SIS database for a non-Schengen, non-EU country.
“The minimum anyone could say is that there is a great deal of uncertainty about whether or not that negotiation would be successful,” he said. “It won’t be straightforward. You are going to have to get 27 other countries to agree. Whatever the willingness of the other countries to make sure that such an important partner, such as Britain was still involved, the practicalities of doing that are enormous.”
He said the fact that Europe had embedded police co-operation into the EU meant that devising a parallel arrangement would entail massive legal complexity. “The mechanism of doing that, forget the politics, would be a hell of a job.”
Europol is involved in 50 counter-terrorism cases, “large and small in significance”, which Wainwright said was a reflection of greater European co-operation as much as the gravity of the terrorist threat.
France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK are said by Europol to be most at risk of a terror attack, either because they have participated in airstrikes against Islamic State or because their citizens are taking up arms in the Middle East.
“An Isis or an Isis-affiliated group is likely to attack Europe again,” Wainwright said, repeating earlier warnings following the Paris attacks. “These are well-trained cells of terrorists with good operational security, clearly battle-hardened from the conflict in Syria, and have come back to execute a plan that has been drawn up in Syria.”
Europol is putting together a group of 200 intelligence experts, who will be sent to the Greek islands on rotation to check for terrorist suspects sneaking into Europe with refugees and migrants. “The number are almost negligible … but every single case deserves investigation.”
Wainwright distanced himself from Dearlove’s claim that giving Turkey visa-free access to the EU would be “like storing gasoline next to the fire”.
The EU has proposed giving 79 million Turkish citizens visa-free travel rights to the EU, although the agreement is in jeopardy as Turkey’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, refuses to meet a key EU condition of rewriting his country’s counter-terrorism laws.
If it comes into force, the visa deal would also oblige Turkey to work more closely with EU police forces to stop European fighters going to Syria and Iraq, and to sign a co-operation agreement with Europol.
For these reasons, Wainwright said, the EU-Turkey visa deal would bring “significant security benefits to the EU because it would open up much greater co-operation than we have now”.