October 25, 2001	Thursday	Shaba'an 7, 1422

BRUSSELS, Oct 24: European Union leaders’ secret nightmare must be that Osama bin Laden or one of his senior aides is arrested in Europe.

Under an EU charter of fundamental rights adopted last year, “no one may be removed, expelled or extradited to a state where there is a serious risk that he or she would be subjected to the death penalty, torture or other inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”.

But EU officials fear the Bush administration may now be challenging that taboo with a list of proposals for anti-terrorism cooperation sent to Brussels, according to a document seen by Reuters.

A demand that the EU “eliminate discrimination against United States and third (non-EU) countries’ extradition requests to member states” features on a US list of 47 proposals transmitted last week.

The list also calls for the EU to “explore alternatives to extradition including expulsion and deportation, where legally available and more efficient”.

One US official said that if it was easier for a European country to uproot and expel a terrorist suspect to his country of origin or a third country than to extradite him to the United States, “that might make it easier to do a snatch”.

US and EU officials say the proposals were drafted at the request of Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, who holds the EU’s rotating presidency, and European Commission President Romano Prodi when they visited Washington on September 20.

Belgian Justice Minister Marc Verwilghen told parliament shortly afterwards there was no question of extraditing anyone who could face the death penalty.

The wish list does not explicitly mention capital punishment, but US officials said it was implicit as one of the grounds on which they fear being discriminated against in EU extradition proceedings.

It is hard to imagine the United States waiving the death penalty on anyone suspected of involvement in the September 11 airliner attacks on New York and Washington, which it blames on bin Laden’s Afghan-based al Qaeda network.

However, US officials note that four Islamic militants convicted of the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were sentenced to life imprisonment last week under deals negotiated to obtain their extradition.

“In my personal view, (the issue of capital punishment) is not a deal breaker,” a US government official said.

The official said a key concern was that a single European arrest warrant, due to be adopted in December, should not give EU countries automatic priority over the United States in obtaining the extradition of a suspect.

EXTRADITION PRIORITIES: “We are urging the EU to come up with some additional phrase that refers to the need to consider the severity of the charge when deciding on extradition,” she said.

“If someone arrested in Spain is wanted for a firearms offence in Germany and a bin Laden-related crime in America, we don’t want to be at the bottom of the pile,” the official said.

The US investigation into the September 11 suicide hijackers has produced evidence that some of the suspects had lived in Germany, raising the possibility that accomplices may still be in Europe.

The official said US and EU negotiators had already made some progress on sharing border alerts for terrorism suspects and were discussing ways of routinely exchanging information between US law enforcement agencies and Europol, the EU’s police intelligence agency.

European diplomats said US proposals on data sharing that urge the EU, with its strong data protection culture, to revise draft directives on privacy “in the context of law enforcement and counter-terrorism imperatives” may cause problems.

But perhaps the most politically sensitive demand is that the EU “join with the United States in concerted financial, economic and political isolation of states that continue to harbour terrorists”.

EU diplomats said that could reopen festering transatlantic disputes over US efforts to prevent EU members doing business with countries such as Iran, Syria and Cuba which are on a State Department list of alleged state sponsors of terrorism.—Reuters