Ekaterina Zaharieva before her EU counterparts: Disinformation Is a Serious Security Challenge
21 January 2019 News
The action plan against disinformation, the preparation for the EU - League of Arab States ministerial meeting and cooperation between the EU and ASEAN dominated the agenda of this year's first EU External Affairs Council meeting held in Brussels today. The Bulgarian delegation was headed by Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva, who is also Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the judicial reform.
The EU top diplomats continued their discussion on building a comprehensive and coordinated response to disinformation. They discussed the application of specific measures based on the EU Action Plan of December 5, 2018, focusing on the external aspects of dealing with the challenge.
“I want to thank Federica Mogherini for this timely discussion. The adoption of the Action Plan was the first important step but now we need to focus on the implementation of the planned measures. We agree with the countries which describe disinformation as one of the biggest security challenges for the Union,” said Zaharieva.
It transpired during the discussion that the unit for strategic communication in the countries of the Eastern Partnership has intercepted close to 4,700 cases of disinformation and that the EU has increased its total budget for combatting hybrid attacks to 5 million leva.
The ministers agreed that it is important not only to intercept on time acts of disinformation but also to expose them publicly - and that no country can manage on its own in doing this. The participants stressed that the EU will interact with NATO and G7 in this area.
They also discussed the idea of having a EU Commissioner in charge of combatting disinformation and gave examples of fake-news campaigns such as one in which photos from the time of the Pinochet regime were presented as a case of police brutality in Spain against Catalan separatists.
The EU Foreign Ministers backed a proposal for the promotion of independent, quality journalism, emphasizing the importance of principles such as checking the sources of information. They underscored that the EU is the target of disinformation campaigns from various directions and needs to be prepared to react to each one of them.
The Foreign Ministers exchanged opinions on the EU relations with the League of Arab States (LAS). They hailed the upcoming ministerial and summit meetings due in February 2019, and stressed the importance of having an open dialogue between the two regions on a broad scope of issues. The discussion focused on the efforts towards making progress in resolving regional conflicts and crises, and on the opportunities for enhancing cooperation between the EU and LAS in areas such as counter-terrorism combat, migration, crisis management and conflict prevention.
The Foreign Affairs Council held a preparatory discussion for the 22nd EU-ASEAN ministerial meeting taking place in Brussels later the same day. The ministers adopted conclusions which hailed the achievement of principled agreement for raising the relations between the two regions to the level of strategic partnership as an expression of the active cooperation and shared ambitions for its further expansion. The Foreign Affairs Council reconfirmed the importance of the priority areas: security, connectivity, trade, economy and investment.
During the meeting, the Foreign Ministers discussed briefly the latest developments in Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Venezuela and other issues from the current agenda. Council conclusions on Nicaragua were also adopted.
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