In the context of the exponential growth of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the President of the European Parliament has announced a number of measures to contain the spread of epidemic and to safeguard Parliament's core activities.
The current precautionary measures adopted by the European Parliament to contain the spread of COVID-19 do not affect work on legislative priorities. Core activities are reduced, but maintained to ensure that the institution's legislative, budgetary, scrutiny functions are maintained.
The meetings will be with remote participation for Members (being able to view and listen to proceedings, ask for the floor and intervene in the meeting). Other participants are invited to follow the meeting through webstreaming.Following these decisions, the next meeting of the Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE) will take place on 24 and 25 February 2021 (online).
The exercise was opened on Wednesday by the Estonian Minister of Defence, Kalle Laanet, and EDA’s Deputy Chief Executive Olli Ruutu. In this opening remarks, Minister Laanet stressed the importance of European cooperation in cyber defence because Member States all face the same or similar threats. “Today we can see that at the EU level civilian CERTs have established good community and their cooperation is improved continuously. However, military CERTs, which play vital role in cyber defence, are not communicating with the same methods. This is understandable considering the more sensitive information they are dealing with. Yet, despite these limitations, it is still important to offer opportunities for extending information-sharing practices. And this live-fire exercise does exactly that”, the Minister said. He thanked EDA “without their visionary leadership this event would not have taken place”. The exercise allows to build teamwork at national levels and “will strengthen the resilience of the European societies and Europe as a whole”, the Minister said.
EDA Deputy Chief Executive Olli Ruutu recalled that the Agency has been supporting Member States’ efforts to develop their cyber defence capabilities for a number of years. Today, EDA cyber activities range from defining key priorities at EU level looking at the capability development, R&T and industrial dimensions to facilitate the development of tangible capabilities (such as the Cyber Ranges Federation platform) and the adoption of emerging and disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and 5G. EDA also runs initiatives in support of Cyber Defence training, education and exercises, he said. “We are working in close cooperation with other EU institutions and agencies, including with ENISA, CERT-EU and the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) in the framework of our quadrilateral Cyber Memorandum of Understanding. And we are also contributing to the EU-NATO cyber dialogue and cooperation in the context of the 2016 and 2018 Joint Declaration, working at different levels with the key cyber actors within the Alliance”, Mr Ruutu stressed. Cooperation between military CERTs is a top priority in EDA’s cyber defence programme as reflected in this exercise and the follow-on conference in Lille in June, he said.