EU Has Terrorism on Its Mind

European leaders gathered for an emergency counter-terrorism summit in Brussels today are poised to tackle an urgent challenge: the prospect of a prolonged battle at home.

Last week’s suicide attacks in the United States triggered a crackdown across Europe on suspected Islamic terrorists, including a network allegedly linked to Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden and suspected of having plotted to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris.

At the same time, Europeans have realized that joining forces against terrorism will require the kind of cooperation--in this instance, among law enforcement and intelligence services--that the European Union has achieved only painstakingly and incompletely on such economic matters as a common currency.

In addition to addressing the possibility of combat in Afghanistan, the 15 prime ministers of the European Union will consider proposals today that seem suddenly pressing in a region where the threat of terrorism is widespread and targets are plentiful.

Laying the groundwork Thursday in Brussels, Europe’s justice and interior ministers discussed measures such as centralizing and linking their anti-terrorism courts and task forces, attacking the financing of terrorism, even creating a Europe-wide arrest warrant to replace extradition procedures.

“The fight against this scourge can only be a global fight covering political, police, judicial and fiscal aspects,” Antoine Duquesne, Belgium’s interior minister, said after the meeting Thursday.

Change will not be easy. Internal border controls have all but disappeared in Europe. But police, spies and judges move less easily among nations than do goods, tourists and terrorists.

Among the obstacles to coordinated crime prevention are conflicts among judicial systems. Britain’s bears a closer resemblance to U.S. courts than to the Napoleonic, inquisitorial systems of France, Spain and Italy. In one instance, an alleged Algerian terrorist kingpin imprisoned in Britain has been able to fend off extradition to France for five years, forcing a French court to try him in absentia on charges of financing a wave of bombings in 1995.

“The real problem is that the anti-terrorist fight raises questions of national sovereignty,” said Alain Marsaud, a former French anti-terrorism judge and lawmaker, in an interview Thursday.

The politics grow especially delicate when it comes to issues such as the financing of terrorism. A multimillion-dollar Bin Laden network allegedly receives secret financing from Islamic charities and important Middle Eastern companies that function without constraints in countries including Switzerland and Britain, according to experts.

“It’s not a question of new laws. It’s a question of political will,” said a French anti-terrorism expert who asked not to be identified. “This network involves 500 companies around the world. The countries have to stop tolerating this.”

Terrorists also use the proceeds of organized crime, from drug trafficking to credit card fraud.

The primarily Algerian network that plotted to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in 1999, allegedly at Bin Laden’s behest, was linked to a criminal network in Canada and France that specialized in the theft of computers and mobile phones, according to an Interpol report last year.

France has led the way in confronting the legal and illegal funding of terrorism. France and the U.S. jointly sponsored a U.N. convention that would create powerful new weapons against such funding: monitoring suspicious transactions, freezing assets and limiting bank secrecy.

The United Nations adopted the convention in 1999, but it has not yet been ratified by the required number of member states. Resistance has come not only from Middle Eastern nations but from European financial havens, according to French officials who want to renew efforts to make the international treaty a reality.

The fact that European leaders are even discussing proposals such as a Europe-wide arrest warrant shows how the climate has changed since Sept. 11. Theoretically, such a warrant would enable police to make an arrest in one country and send a suspect to another without need for extradition procedures.