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Europe doesn't need an Australian-style border protection system to solve its asylum seeker crisis, according to Europol director Rob Wainwright.
Key points:
- Europol chief says boat tow backs, offshore detention won't work in Europe
- He says number of people seeking asylum in Europe 10 times that of Australia
- Europol identified 17,000 people involved in people smuggling trade last year
Mr Wainwright, a former British intelligence analyst, told the ABC's Lateline boat tow-backs and offshore detention centres would be futile in Europe.
"Where in Europe are we going to tow our boats back to a safe port? Where is the offshore detention centres in Europe where we can take our refugees to?" he said.
"The circumstances are uniquely different.
"Think of the scale. Approximately 1.2 million people sought asylum in Europe last year. Just under 300,000 were granted that.
"That's a figure something like 10 times what it is for Australia over the last couple of years."
Earlier this year, one of the architects of the Australian border protection policy, retired Major-General Jim Molan, accused European authorities of "making up excuses" for not controlling their borders.
It's a major issue as the Netherlands' election gets underway, with right-wing prime ministerial candidate Geert Wilders having praised Australia's model in the past, and vowing to introduce a ban on Muslim immigration if he wins.
Speaking to Lateline from The Hague, Mr Wainwright said Europe needed a European-style approach to border protection.
"[Europol] is very focused and only focused on stopping these high-end criminal organisations, these international [people smuggling] syndicates from exploiting the situation," he said.
The law enforcement agency believes more than 90 per cent of asylum seekers coming to Europe pay people smugglers.
"We see [people smugglers] running ads through social media sites," Mr Wainwright said.
"Just in the last year alone, Europol has identified 17,000 more people that are involved in the people smuggling trade so that gives you a taste for the scale of this problem."
There will be further terrorist attacks: Wainwright
There have been 12 major terrorist incidents in Europe over the past two years and Europol, which helps coordinate counter-terrorism operations, said the continent faced its "highest threat for a generation".
"The size of the radicalised community is in the thousands," Mr Wainwright said.
"We will have probably, I think, further attacks. That's also what many national counter-terrorism authorities are saying in Europe."
Ever since the Paris and Brussels attacks, most European terrorist attacks have been carried out by so-called lone wolves.
But Mr Wainwright doesn't think the risk of an attack by a coordinated jihadist network has disappeared.
"I still think [Islamic State] will at least attempt that. The reason we haven't seen one, touch wood, since then is because we've squeezed the space," he said.
"We've seen a 10-fold increase in the amount of counter-terrorism data shared with us in the last two years so clearly there's a much bigger response now in intelligence sharing."
Internet more useful for terrorists than a borderless Europe
A number of nationalist politicians would like to scrap the Schengen Agreement, the treaty that allows passport-free travel throughout much of mainland Europe.
They claim that would make it much harder for asylum seekers and terrorists to cross the continent.
But Mr Wainwright said the debate needed to be put in perspective.
"The internet is far more important as a facilitator of crime and terrorism than the Schengen free border movement," he said.
"No-one is talking about taking the internet away, of course they shouldn't, why would they?
"We choose to live our life here in Europe, like you do in Australia, in which we cherish the freedoms that we have and the values we live and we're not going to change that just because some terrorists are trying to make our lives more miserable."
Watch the interview tonight on Lateline at 9.30pm (AEDT) on ABC News 24 or 10.30pm on ABC TV.
Topics: immigration, community-and-society, refugees, terrorism, unrest-conflict-and-war, world-politics, european-union, netherlands