THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - The European Union's top criminal prosecutor is calling on member countries to update and harmonize anti-terrorism laws to deal more effectively with the twin threats of European-born participants in Islamic jihad and solitary extremists.
Michele Coninsx, president of Eurojust, the EU's agency for judicial cooperation, told the Associated Press despite much progress, "we see popping up new prosecution gaps" that could hinder cross-border efforts to combat terrorism.
Coninsx, a career prosecutor and counterterrorism specialist from Belgium, said in an interview Tuesday that among the EU's 28 member nations, laws differ on how to deal with lone participants in terrorist actions, or recruiters also acting alone.
Similarly, she said, EU countries' laws vary on how to treat people traveling to fight with extremist groups in Syria or Iraq, or who have returned from battlefields there. She advocates a single EU-wide definition of "foreign terrorist fighters," which she said would help police and prosecutors from different countries work more seamlessly together.
The Hague-based agency that Coninsx has headed since 2012 was tapped by EU leaders this month to play a greater part in forming a common front against terrorism.
Eurojust, where each EU country is represented by a senior prosecutor or judge, is supposed to step up information-sharing and operational cooperation in the anti-terrorism field, as is its crosstown neighbor in this Dutch city, the EU-wide police agency Europol.
"We should really strive for a common approach because the problem is obviously common," Coninsx said. "It starts locally. It starts nationally, but it doesn't stay there. So we should not only collect information, we should connect information."