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BERLIN—Germany released a plan to rein in known extremists after authorities failed to prevent a terrorist attack last month by a Tunisian radical on a government watch list.

The proposed overhauls aim to make it easier for police to monitor, detain and deport asylum seekers believed to pose a terror threat, Germany’s interior and justice ministers said on Tuesday.

The plan—which the government plans to implement with legal changes in the weeks to come—reflects efforts to tighten enforcement within the guidelines of constitutional safeguards, informed by abuses committed under the Nazis, that strongly protect personal freedom.

Under current state police laws, for instance, preventive custody doesn’t exceed 14 days. Detentions of foreigners to be expelled also face stringent legal requirements, such as the necessity to obtain proof of identity of a suspect from his or her country of origin.

Under the ministers’ proposals, police would be allowed to detain rejected asylum seekers deemed dangerous for up to 18 months, by lowering some of the current requirements.

German authorities have been seeking ways to improve antiterror enforcement since Anis Amri rammed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market last month, killing 12 people and exposing holes in the country’s security architecture.

The planned overhaul “shows that in difficult times we are capable of finding reasonable solutions that will increase the safety of citizens in Germany without disproportionately constraining the public’s freedoms,” said Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière.

German authorities came under criticism for failing to expel Amri in the months before the attack even though he was on a watch list of extremists, had voiced plans to commit atrocities and was using fake identities.

The target of Tuesday’s proposals are people like Amri who are found to be radical Islamists capable of committing an attack. German authorities are tracking 550 such extremists—known in German as Gefährder—according to security officials. Half of them are believed to be in Germany. Amri was killed by police in Italy several days after the Berlin attack.

Most of these individuals haven’t been determined to have broken laws, leaving German authorities few legal tools to keep them in check. Around 80 are in detention. The others are being watched by police and intelligence services, some more closely than others, security officials said.

The German constitution makes it very hard to detain people who aren’t suspected of committing a crime. That contrasts with the U.S., which allows the detention of terrorism suspects for indefinite periods.

“It’s pretty much impossible to take a Gefährder into custody unless one has a very concrete indication that a person is planning an immediate attack,” said Nikolaos Gazeas, a Cologne-based lawyer and expert on counterterrorism law. “That would mean a complete inversion of our legal system.” CONTINUE AT SITE

In the last debate of the 2012 presidential race Governor Romney discussed the potential threat of Russia. He was widely criticized by President Obama who maintained the Cold War ended in the 1980’s. Since then, of course, we have had a national “reset.” Vladimir Putin’s aggressive action in eastern Ukraine, Syria and his openly provocative statements about the Baltic states and the use of nuclear weapons offer revealing insights into Russian aims. Still there are those who believe Russia can be an ally, at least in areas where U.S.-Russian interests converge, e.g. battling militant Islam.

However, if one considers the history of Russia since the presumptive end of the Cold War, a different conclusion is plausible. Since 1989, Russian policy has been designed to undo the crumbling of the Soviet Empire, what might be described as Global Revenge. Putin’s stance is to reclaim the Near Abroad – those nations once within the Soviet orbit. Using the appearance of “democracy,” religious observance and elections, Russia’s president has moved assiduously to destroy internal adversaries and external opponents. The velvet glove of concern for those lost in the 9/11 attack concealed the iron fist of invasion and intimidation.

Despite its newly adopted nomenclature, the KGB operatives dominate foreign policy. The Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov is expected to be a magician who has veils behind veils in his Orwellian rhetoric. On the one hand, he speaks with compassion about the victims of bombing in Aleppo and then signals Russian planes to engage in indiscriminate bombing in this Syrian city. What you see is only what you think you see. Having played Secretary of State John Kerry like a drum, Lavrov has converted Russia into the strong horse in the Middle East and reduced the United States to irrelevance.

With the crumbling of communism, Russia became distracted by privatization schemes in the 1990’s. What these schemes truly represented was the emergence of a new elite that distributed national wealth to the soon to be oligarchs and the former KGB leaders who slowly entered into “partnerships” with the corporate and banking sectors. Revelations of Putin’s wealth suggest he may be the richest man on the globe. In fact, his daughter, who hasn’t engaged in any legitimate business activity, has an estimated wealth of $16 billion.

Ruling Fidesz party vice president pledges to ‘sweep out’ NGOs
Premier Orban, Trump backer, vowed to build ‘illiberal state’

Hungary plans to crack down on non-governmental organizations linked to billionaire George Soros now that Donald Trump will occupy the White House, according to the deputy head of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s party.

The European Union member will use “all the tools at its disposal” to “sweep out” NGOs funded by the Hungarian-born financier, which “serve global capitalists and back political correctness over national governments,” Szilard Nemeth, a vice president of the ruling Fidesz party, told reporters on Tuesday. No one answered the phone at the Open Society Institute in Budapest when Bloomberg News called outside business hours.

“I feel that there is an opportunity for this, internationally,” because of Trump’s election, state news service MTI reported Nemeth as saying. Lawmakers will start debating a bill to let authorities audit NGO executives, according to parliament’s legislative agenda.

Orban, the first European leader to publicly back Trump’s campaign, has ignored criticism from the European Commission and U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration for building a self-described “illiberal state” modeled on authoritarian regimes including Russia, China and Turkey. In 2014, Orban personally ordered the state audit agency to probe foundations financed by Norway and said that civil society groups financed from abroad were covers for “paid political activists.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Photographer: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Orban and his administration have frequently singled out NGOs supported by Soros, a U.S. Democratic Party supporter with a wide network of organizations that promote democracy in formerly communist eastern Europe.

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to get tough with the UN, a corrupt, bloated bureaucracy that for seven decades has existed to provide cushy jobs for international deadbeats, and to promote the interests of tyrannical regimes and anti-American pygmy states. Recognizing the UN’s failures and corruption, some commentators are calling for targeted reductions of the estimated $8-10 billion a year we spend on the UN and its 15 affiliated organizations, thus prodding Turtle Bay to reform. But the better argument is to withdraw completely. Changing the shade of lipstick on this multinational pig is not going to keep it from acting like a pig.

Indeed, “reforming” the UN is a mantra politicians periodically repeat in order to avoid doing what’s necessary to make significant changes. Remember the old UN Human Rights Commission? It was completely ineffective because it regularly seated some of the world’s worst human rights violators, including China, Zimbabwe, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Algeria, Syria, Libya, Uganda and Vietnam. At the same time, as stalwart UN critic Ann Bayefsky wrote in 2002, “Commission members seek to avoid directly criticizing states with human rights problems, frequently by focusing on Israel, a state that, according to analysis of summary records, has for over 30 years occupied 15 percent of commission time and has been the subject of a third of country-specific resolutions.” To add insult to the injury, that same year the Commission passed a resolution giving the Palestinian Arabs the de facto “legitimate right” to use terrorism against Israel.

The serial ignoring of Sudan’s responsibility for the human rights disaster unfolding in Darfur, and the election of Sudan to the Commission finally put an end to the UNHRC, which was replaced in 2006 with the “reformed” UN Human Rights Council. After ten years it’s obvious that the change was cosmetic, as the Council has repeated the same sins of its predecessor. It continues to seat members from nations like current members China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, all notorious for violating human rights. And it continues its chronic demonization of Israel, which it has condemned five times more than any other country. Nor is this vicious bigotry confined to the Council: last March, the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) condemned only one nation, Israel, for violating women’s rights.