EUROPE MOVES TO TOUGHEN LAWS TO FIGHT TERRORISM

BRUSSELS --- The European Commission proposed drastic changes today in
European law enforcement in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the
United States.

If Europe adopts the measures, judges would be able to issue arrest and
search warrants that could be enforced across the continent. Extradition
procedures would be eliminated. All 15 member nations would also adopt the
same definition of "terrorist crimes" with higher penalties and a
Europe-wide agreement on sentences, with life imprisonment being the maximum.

The ideas are not new -- they arose two years ago at a conference of
Europe's justice ministers in Finland -- but they were revived this week
after the attacks in the United States, the arrests of suspected Islamic
fundamentalist terrorists in Belgium and the Netherlands and the discovery
that suspected pilots of the planes used in the suicide attacks had lived
in Germany.

The proposal, which followed an announcement by the United States on
Tuesday that it would expand its power to detain immigrants suspected of
crimes, was presented to the European Parliament by Antonio Vitorino,
minister of justice and home affairs for the European Commission, which is
the executive branch of the European Union. It rests, he said "on the
mutual recognition of judicial decisions of the member states, and becomes
the cornerstone of European judicial cooperation."

Under the proposal, the Europe-wide warrants could be used to seek not only
terrorists, but also organized-crime figures, traffickers in arms, people
or drugs, and people accused of sex crimes against women and children.

As of now, only six of the European Union's 15 countries -- Britain,
France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain -- even have legislation
mentioning terrorist acts, and their definitions vary.

The proposals by the commission will be put before a meeting of European
justice and home affairs ministers on Thursday and then on Friday before a
special European Union session on terrorism. If those bodies endorse them,
and the Parliament passes them, they would still need to be written into
the legislation of all 15 member nations to become law.

Right now, said Leonello Gabrici, Mr. Vitorino's spokesman, organized crime
figures, smugglers and terrorist cells often have operations in several
countries and use legal variations to frustrate attempts to arrest members
or seize their assets.

Bureaucratic rules and loopholes sometimes make it hard for the police in
one country to assist another.

Under the proposed changes, "the important thing is that what triggers
police and judicial mutual assistance is the crime itself, not the person's
residence or nationality," Mr. Gabrici said.

With common definitions of serious crimes, a prosecutor in France, for
instance, could get a warrant enforceable under German law and ask the
German police to execute it, instead of having essentially to explain his
case to a German prosecutor, confirm that it violated German law and wait
for that prosecutor to get a warrant from a German court.