HANOI, Oct 8: European and Asian leaders called on Friday for the United Nations to spearhead the fight against international terrorism in veiled criticism of the unilateral US approach to global threats.

Enlarging the UN Security Council, instability in Iraq, tension on the Korean peninsula, weapons non-proliferation and disease control were also discussed on the opening day of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM).

"The leaders agreed that the United Nations should play the leading role in preserving international peace and security," 25 European Union and 13 Asian nations said in a statement at the talks here.

European and Asian leaders emphasized the need for stronger ties between the two regions to balance their respective strong bonds with the United States, with particular focus on security issues.

"For the most part the speakers specifically stressed the increasing role on the United Nations in dealing with this problem (of terrorism)," Romano Prodi, head of the EU's executive commission, told reporters.

"We are not a decision-making group. This is an exchange of views but being 40 percent of the world's population, I think this exchange will have some consequence," he said.

French President Jacques Chirac, who headed to China from Vietnam, was more blunt in his criticism of Washington, attacking the war in Iraq as illegal without UN backing and expressing grave fears for the country's future.

"I believe it was a bad solution which didn't conform with legality and with international law, and so it was a mistake," he told China Central TV. Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency, said terrorism was a "global problem" that required global solutions, but was gentler towards the United States.

"The UN of course as a world wide organisation is best placed to take the initiative. I have the feeling also that the United States shares these views," he said.

Bot also said after meeting Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing that the Dutch presidency was doing its best to forge a consensus on whether the EU should lift the weapons ban, which Washington insists should remain.

Li said China was confident that the embargo, "a product of the Cold War", would soon go. "We are confident that cooperation between China and the EU as time goes on will be stronger and more fruitful," he told reporters.

On the big topic looming over the ASEM summit, EU leaders were less conciliatory as they took Myanmar's military dictatorship to task for failing to deliver on promises of democratic reform. "In fact, we have established the fact that there has been very little progress and in most essential areas of human rights, there has been no improvement at all," Bot said.

On Thursday Myanmar was one of three members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations that joined ASEM, alongside Cambodia and Laos, and the 10 new EU states. But its admission into the grouping was tempered by the EU's announcement that it would slap tougher sanctions on the junta for failing to meet several demands including the release of detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Britain, the country's former colonial power, repeated its call for the release of the Nobel peace prize winner and other members of her National League for Democracy. "This would send a strong signal that Myanmar is serious about building a democratic nation," Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott told a summit dinner. --AFP