By Tito Drago
MADRID, Feb 16 2002 (IPS)

An agreement reached Friday by the European Union justice ministers to negotiate a treaty on judicial cooperation with the United States highlights differences between the EU and US regarding human rights and the fight against terrorism and organised crime.

The justice ministers stressed that the economic and social roots of terrorism and wars must be attacked, and said that every international military operation must be carried out on the mandate of the United Nations, rather than unilaterally.

The justice ministers of the 15 EU countries reached the agreement at a meeting in the city of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.

In recent days, the US policy against terrorism has been questioned by European officials like the EU commissioner of external affairs, Chris Patten, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, and Germany’s ministers of foreign relations and defence, Joschka Fischer and Rudolf Scharping.

The justice ministers said they agreed on the need to hash out a “political accord” to negotiate a treaty on extradition and police and judicial cooperation with the United States, but one that would “safeguard European principles and values.”

The treaty should contain guarantees of fair trial and safeguards that people extradited to the United States will not be sentenced to death, said Spanish Justice Minister Angel Acebes, who presided over the meeting in Santiago de Compostela.

“Any accord reached with the United States should take into account the limits, in the context of respect for fundamental rights and liberties, set out in the laws and constitutions of the members of the (European) Union, as well as all legal guarantees,” said Acebes.

Patten stated last Saturday that the events unleashed by the Sep 11 terrorist attacks in the United States had revealed the dark side of globalisation.

Now we know what the great injustices of the global economy can lead us to, said the EU commissioner, who pointed to a new awareness of the need to attack the root causes of terrorism and violence.

“Smart bombs have their place, but smart development assistance seems to me even more significant,” Patten told the British publication The Guardian on Saturday, while terming U.S. anti-terrorist policy as “absolutist and simplistic.”

U.S. President George W. Bush’s description of North Korea, Iran and Iraq as an “axis of evil” that harbors and sponsors terrorism was criticised by Patten as “more rhetoric than substance.”

Meanwhile, French Defence Minister Alain Richard said Bush’s remarks revealed “a maximalist tendency,” and Scharping stressed that “the United States will learn that the fight against terrorism is not only a military one, and that in the future it will need friends and partners.”

European critics of Washington’s foreign policy also referred to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

“We Europeans do not agree with Washington’s Middle East policy, and we believe it is an error to support Ariel Sharon’s policy of pure repression,” said French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine.

But what most upsets Europeans is the scarce importance Washington puts on the positions taken by its allies. “Despite all the differences in weight and size, alliances between democracies are not based on follow-the-leader. Partners is one thing, and satellite countries is another,” said Fischer.

“Gulliver can’t go it alone, and I don’t think it’s helpful if we regard ourselves as so Lilliputian that we can’t speak up and say it,” Patten told The Guardian.

On Feb 8, Jospin warned the United States not give in to “the strong temptation of unilateralism.”

Unilateral decisions taken by the United States during the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and Afghanistan this year even ruffled feathers within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the military alliance in which the United States and Europe play a predominant role.

NATO Secretary-General George Robertson reacted in irritation to statements by U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, according to whom the alliance determines the mission, but does not carry it out.

Robertson, a British national, said an ongoing coalition is always better than a provisional one, and added that he was prepared to “reinvent” NATO to keep the United States from applying unilateral decisions.

On the other hand, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1979-90), of the opposition Conservative Party – to which Patten also belongs – is clearly aligned with Bush.

According to Thatcher, U.S. allies, and particularly the British, should give even greater support to Bush in any decision he takes on the Iraq question.

The United States has a president capable of assuming the leadership that is so indispensable for confronting these criminal regimes, she added.

Acebes noted that the treaty on judicial and police cooperation between the European Union and the United States would be a pioneer agreement, because so far external relations on the legal front have been a question left up to each European member state.

The agreement with the United States will be the first treaty on judicial cooperation between the European Union and a country outside the bloc.

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