From the 2017 action plan to the SPIRIT project
In the 21st century, terroristic attacks on places of worship in Europe started to exceptionally increase. While they were a significant but comparatively rare phenomenon prior to 2013[1], the trend led to a spike of attacks in 2016, before reducing again in frequency.
In response to this emerging trend, influenced by various factors such as the rise of Daesh, the European Commission, for the first time, highlighted the significance of safeguarding places of worship within its 2017 Action Plan to Support the Protection of Public Spaces. However, it did so only briefly, citing them as a singular example of public spaces.
In addition to a wide number of measures, the Action Plan highlighted the importance of EU funding to “provide another way to support Member States in the protection of public spaces” and initiated a call for proposals, to “support transnational projects improving the protection of public spaces” through the already existing Internal Security Fund Police (ISFP), worth EUR 18.5 million.
This decision had a significant impact on the ISFP and would eventually pave the way for the implementation of the ISF co-funded SPIRIT project.
The Internal Security Fund Police had in fact already been established in 2014 with two key objectives:
- Combating cross-border, serious and organised crime and reinforcing coordination and cooperation between law enforcement authorities and other national authorities of EU States.
- Enhancing the capacity of EU States and the Union for managing security-related risk and protecting people and critical infrastructure against terrorist attacks and other security related incidents.
The fund’s focus on the capacity of the member states and law enforcement authorities is also reflected in the management of the Internal Security Fund Police, which is “mainly implemented by EU participating countries”. Thus, in contrast to other funding frameworks of the EC, like HORIZON Europe, participation in the ISFP was largely restricted to the Member States’ public bodies and their respective law enforcement agencies.
There was and is however one crucial exception, the so-called “union actions”, an element of the funding mechanism, which is open for participation also to organisations, like universities, NGOs and industry actors, through calls for proposals published in the Funding and Tenders Portal of the EC.
It is this funding mechanism, which ultimately would also be acquired to co-fund the SPIRIT project and, coming back to the “Action Plan to support the Protection of Public Spaces”, facilitated the previously mentioned first call for proposals to “support transnational projects improving the protection of public spaces” in 2017.
A new opportunity for co-funded ISFP projects
This marked a significant shift. In 2016 only three calls for proposals under the ISFP, with a combined budget of EUR 7.3 million, were launched via the Funding and Tenders Portal – none of which directly focused on the protection of public spaces and only two of which were open for participants other than public bodies. In 2017 this had notably changed, with a total of 15 calls for proposals launched via the Funding and Tenders portal, and a budget of EUR 18.5 million explicitly attributed to the call focused on the protection of public spaces.
This first call for proposals, called “PROTECTION”, however solely focused on the protection of public spaces in general and did not directly make any references to public spaces of worship. Consequently, none of the 15 co-funded projects focused on this area specifically. Subsequent calls for proposals launched through the ISFP in 2018 and 2019 followed this trend and did not explicitly emphasise places of worship, while the allocated budget had dropped from EUR 18.5 million in 2017 to EUR 3 million by 2019.
The new framework programme
However, this situation changed significantly in 2020, when two key developments led to a stronger focus on places of worship within the ISFP´s general focus on the protection of public spaces.
First, 2020 marked the final year of the first framework programme of the Internal Security Fund Police and new budget negotiations and thematic adaptions were now required in order to establish the next framework programme. This follow-up was now called Internal Security Fund and would cover the period from 2021 until 2027.
This allowed for larger changes to the ISFP´s focus and crucially coincided with the second key development; the publication of the new EU Counter Terrorism Agenda for 2020 to 2025, which had been presented on the 9th of December 2020.
The new Agenda highlighted the 2019 extreme right-wing terrorist attack on a synagogue in Halle and stated:
“Places of worship hold a particularly high symbolic value and have frequently been targeted by terrorists. We must better protect churches, mosques and synagogues as well as other religious sites across the EU. We should also foster cooperation between the different faith communities and the relevant national authorities as they exchange experiences.”
Thus, while places of worship had only been included as examples of a public space in the 2017 Action plan, their security and protection had now been explicitly made a key priority under the new EU Counter Terrorism Agenda, stressing as one of its key actions to “enhance the physical protection of places of worship, in close coordination with Member States.”.
The agenda also once more identified the Internal Security Fund as a key funding instrument to be used to advance its objectives.
Indeed, already in 2020, the ISFP launched once more a call for proposals focused on the protection of public spaces. However, this time the protection of public places of worship was not only explicitly mentioned, it had been elevated to one of three key priority areas which proposals had to address. Alongside, the available budget, which had been subject to continuous decreases since the first PROTECTION call of the EC, had been increased to EUR 12 million, leading to the co-funding of ten projects.
Of these new projects six co-funded initiatives (SHIELD, SOAR, ProSPeReS, PROSECUW, PROTECTOR and SASCE) were now directly focused on the protection of public places of worship. This stands in strong contrast to the previous calls for proposals and their co-funded projects.
This trend continued further, although no call for proposals focused on the protection of places of worship or public spaces in general was initiated in 2021, when in 2022 a call specifically focused on “Places of worship” was launched under the new Internal Security Fund Framework, alongside a call focusing on public places in general.
These developments paved the way for the SPIRIT project, which itself includes several partners from the initial six co-funded projects under the 2020 call. Moreover, the SPIRIT project received its co-funding by the EC alongside four sister projects, all focussing on the protection of places of worship and with whom it established close synergies and exchange.
In summary, the protection of places of worship, now a strong focus within the Internal Security Fund, first emerged in 2017 alongside the Action Plan to Support the Protection of Public Spaces. While it was initially simply included as an example among other critical public places in need of protection from potential terrorist attacks, it has since then been defined as key objective under the EU Counter Terrorism Agenda for 2020 to 2025.
[1] Based on data from the global terrorism database analysed during the ISFP co-funded SHIELD Project