Counter-terrorism in Europe: The fight within

In fits and starts, European countries are learning to co-operate more closely, and to share intelligence, in the battle against terrorism

THE decision embarrassed one country, and irritated others intensely. And, with fears of fresh terrorist attacks mounting all over Europe, the timing could not have been less propitious. On July 18th Germany's highest court ruled that a German citizen of Syrian origin, Mamoun Darkazanli, could not be extradited to Spain, where a prosecutor wants to try him as an “interlocutor and assistant” of Osama bin Laden and his network. The suspect has a history of close legal shaves. Last November, he escaped extradition after a court ruling, issued as he was strapped into a helicopter to start his journey to Spain. After the latest decision, lamented by Brigitte Zypries, Germany's justice minister, as a “blow to the government in its fight against terrorism”, he was yet again freed in Hamburg.

In a sharp rebuke to the federal government for its sloppy legal drafting, the court froze the operation in Germany of the “European arrest warrant”. This newish procedure is meant to be a showpiece of the European Union's commitment to fight terrorism and other serious crimes. It has already been invoked some 400 times, by different EU countries, to speed up extraditions. But the German judges found that legislators in Berlin had violated the constitution by passing a law that deprived suspects of a chance to challenge their deportation - even when (as with Mr Darkazanli) many of the alleged misdeeds took place on German soil.

Presumably, Germany's politicians will now take the hint and redraft the law to meet the court's concerns. The court has not challenged the European arrest procedure itself - merely how it was put into effect. But the row over Mr Darkazanli, who was filmed at a wedding in Hamburg with two of the September 11th hijackers, reflects deeper problems facing all EU countries as they confront terrorism.

After the attacks on America, and again after last year's Madrid train bombings, EU members made copious promises to co-operate in the fight against terror. An “action plan”, including 150 separate measures, was launched in June last year. Some two-thirds of these have been translated into political decisions, including EU-wide agreements to bring in passports with two biometric identifiers (facial scans and fingerprints) and to play a bigger part in the international drive against illegal money transfers. The “situation centre” in Brussels, where EU members share intelligence assessments, has begun looking at domestic threats as well as external ones; it has already done some analysis of the London bombings. This week the European Commission proposed more measures, including making explosives more easily traceable and restricting sales of farm fertiliser.

The EU's embryonic law-enforcement institutions - the Europol police agency, and Eurojust, through which prosecutors co-operate - are heavily engaged in anti-terrorism work, building relations with their much bigger brothers in America. Important decisions will come this autumn, such as making personal data more easily available to investigators while also introducing an EU-wide system of data protection. Treading delicately in sensitive territory, the commission is preparing a paper on “radicalisation ” - -polite language for discontent among young Muslims that prompts a few to become terrorists. But officials stress that this will describe the problem, not prescribe solutions; only national governments can do that.

Nor is there any guarantee that common threats will translate into common action. As the EU grows larger, so does queasiness in its biggest members about sharing really hot intelligence with the entire block, says Daniel Keohane of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank. “There will be no Euro-CIA,” he thinks.

This climate leaves the EU's top counter-terrorism official, Gijs de Vries of the Netherlands, in the role of persuader rather than enforcer. But, at least in theory, EU members accept the need to overcome one paradox of an integrating Europe: a virtual absence of border checks in much of Europe (at least before the London bombs prompted some to reimpose them) has made it easy for terrorists to cross frontiers, while detectives and prosecutors remain hamstrung by national borders.

At everyday level, barriers to co-operation are rarely insuperable. The security services of France and America have let it be known that they are co-operating far more closely against terror (in part through a new intelligence-sharing centre in France) than anybody would guess. In the words of Francois Heisbourg, of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, “there's now good security co-operation between those western allies which are prepared to treat one another as equal partners.” Even French complaints of British leniency (especially to Islamists from Algeria) have faded since a recent British decision to extradite a man suspected of financing the 1995 Metro bombings in Paris.

Individual acts of co-operation between European countries are one thing. Longer-term efforts to turn counter-terrorism into a pan-European activity are something else. And, as the Darkazanli case shows, that is a much harder task. Moreover, the problems are not just legal and technical, but political and ethical.

In all European countries, hard questions have been posed by the twin challenges of terrorism and Muslim disaffection. One is how far civil liberty should be sacrificed for security. Another is how to balance help for ethnic and religious minorities with a harder-nosed insistence that all citizens obey the law. Whatever answers are found to these questions, they are not likely to be imposed from Brussels - least of all when the EU is itself in something of an existential crisis.

In fits and starts, European countries are learning to co-operate more closely, and to share intelligence, in the battle against terrorism.