7. SECURE SOCIETIES - PROTECTING FREEDOM AND SECURITY OF EUROPE AND ITS CITIZENS

The Union, its citizens and its international partners are confronted with a range of security threats and challenges like crime, terrorism and mass emergencies due to man-made or natural disasters. These can span across borders and aim at physical targets or the cyberspace. Attacks against critical infrastructures, networks and Internet sites of public authorities and private entities not only undermine the citizen's trust but may seriously affect essential sectors such as energy, transport, health, finance or telecommunications. In order to anticipate, prevent and manage these threats, it is necessary to develop and apply innovative technologies, solutions, foresight tools and knowledge, stimulate cooperation between providers and users, find civil security solutions, improve the competitiveness of European security, industry and services, including ICT, and prevent and combat the abuse of privacy and breaches of human rights in Internet and elsewhere, while ensuring European citizens' individual rights and freedom. The coordination and improvement of the security research and innovation area will thus be an essential element and will help to map present research efforts, including foresight, and improve relevant legal conditions and procedures for coordination, including pre-normative activities. Activities within this societal challenge shall have an exclusive focus on civil applications and will follow a mission-oriented approach, promote efficient cooperation of end-users, industry and researchers, and integrate the relevant societal dimensions whilst complying with ethical principles. They will support the Union's policies for internal and external security, including the Common Foreign and Security Policy and its Common Security and Defence Policy, and improve cyber security, trust and privacy in the Digital Single Market. The activities will include a focus on the research and development of the next generation of innovative solutions, by working on novel concepts and designs, and interoperable standards. This will be done by developing innovative technologies and solutions that address security gaps and lead to a reduction in the risk from security threats. The following specific objectives will be pursued: The ambition is both to avoid an incident and to mitigate its potential consequences. This requires new technologies and capabilities for fighting and preventing crime (including cyber crime), illegal trafficking and terrorism (including cyber terrorism), including understanding causes and impacts of radicalisation and violent extremism, and tackling terrorist ideas and beliefs to also avoid aviation-related threats. New technologies, processes, methods and dedicated capabilities will help to protect critical infrastructures (including in urban areas), systems and services which are essential for the proper functioning of society and economy (including communications, transport, finance, health, food, water, energy, logistic and supply chain, and environment). This will include analysing and securing public and private critical networked infrastructures and services against any type of threats, including aviation-related threats. This will also include protection of maritime transport routes. Technologies and capabilities are also required to enhance systems, equipments, tools, processes, and methods for rapid identification to improve land, marine and coastal border security and management, including both control and surveillance issues, while exploiting the full potential of the European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR). These will be developed and tested considering their effectiveness, compliance with legal and ethical principles, proportionality, social acceptability and the respect of fundamental rights. Research will also support the improvement of the integrated European border management, including through increased cooperation with candidate, potential candidate and European Neighbourhood Policy countries. Cyber security is a prerequisite for people, business and public services in order to benefit from the opportunities offered by the Internet or any other additional data networks and communication infrastructures. It requires providing an improved security for systems, networks, access devices, software and services, including cloud computing, while taking into account the interoperability of multiple technologies. Research and innovation will be supported to help prevent, detect and manage real-time cyber-attacks across multiple domains and jurisdictions, and to protect critical ICT infrastructures. The digital society is in full development with constantly changing uses and abuses of the Internet, new ways of social interaction, new mobile and location-based services and the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). This requires a new type of research which should be triggered by the emerging applications, usage and societal trends. Nimble research initiatives will be undertaken, including pro-active R&D, to react quickly to new contemporary developments in trust and security. Particular attention should be given to the protection of children, as they are highly vulnerable to the emerging forms of cyber crime and abuse. Work here should be conducted in close co-ordination with the ICT strand of the priority "Industrial Leadership". This requires the development of dedicated technologies and capabilities to support different types of emergency management operations in crises and disaster situations (such as civil protection, fire fighting, environmental contamination, marine pollution, civil defence, development of medical information infrastructures, rescue tasks, and disaster recovery processes) as well as law enforcement. Research will cover the whole crisis management chain and societal resilience, and support the establishment of a European emergency response capacity. Safeguarding the human right of privacy, including in the digital society, will require the development of privacy-by-design frameworks and technologies to underpin new products and services. Technologies will be developed allowing users to control their personal data and its use by third parties, as well as tools to detect and block illegal content and data breaches and to protect human rights on-line, preventing that the behaviour of individuals or groups is limited by unlawful searching or profiling. Any new security solution and technology needs to be acceptable to the society, comply with Union and international law, and be effective and proportionate in identifying and addressing the security threat. It is therefore essential to understand the socioeconomic, cultural, and anthropological dimensions of security, the causes of insecurity, the role of media and communication and the citizen's perceptions better. Ethical and legal issues and protection of human values and fundamental rights will be addressed, as well as risk and management issues. Pre-normative and standardisation activities will be supported across all mission areas. Attention will be paid to standardisation gaps and on the next generation of tools and technologies. Activities across all mission areas will also address the integration and interoperability of systems and services, including aspects such as communication, distributed architectures and human factors, including for emergency purposes. New technologies, capabilities and solutions are required to support the Union's external security policies in civilian tasks, ranging from civil protection to humanitarian relief, border management or peace-keeping and post-crisis stabilisation, including conflict prevention, peace-building and mediation. This will require research on conflict resolution and restoration of peace and justice, on early identification of factors leading to conflict and on the impact of restorative justice processes. This also requires promoting interoperability between civilian and military capabilities in civilian tasks ranging from civil protection to humanitarian relief, border management or peace-keeping. This will include technological development in the sensitive area of dual-use technologies to enhance interoperability between civil protection and military forces and amongst civil protection forces worldwide, as well as reliability, organisational, legal and ethical aspects, trade issues, protection of confidentiality and integrity of information and traceability of all transactions and processing. Whereas research and innovation activities will have an exclusive focus on civil applications, coordination with the activities of the European Defence Agency (EDA) will be actively pursued in order to strengthen cooperation with EDA, notably through the already established European Framework Cooperation (EFC), recognising that there are areas of dual-use technology. Coordination mechanisms with relevant Union agencies, such as the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union (FRONTEX), European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA), European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) and European Police Office (Europol), will also be further strengthened in order to improve the coordination of Union programmes and policies in the field of both internal and external security, and of other Union initiatives. Taking into account the particular nature of security, specific arrangements will be put in place with regards to programming and governance, including arrangements with the Committee referred to in Article 10. Classified or otherwise sensitive information related to security will be protected, and particular requirements and criteria for international cooperation may be specified in work programmes. This will also be reflected in the programming and governance arrangements for the specific objective "Secure societies - Protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens" (including the comitology aspects).

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-11-04 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.