EU and Arab Leaders in Anti-terror Agreement

European Union and Mediterranean leaders today agreed on an anti-terrorism code of conduct after all-night talks failed to bring consensus at a summit in Barcelona.

Foreign ministers from 35 countries, including Israel, resolved their differences on how to distinguish between terrorism and the right to resist occupation.

Unnamed diplomats told Reuters that the last-minute compromise was reached when the EU dropped its insistence that the right to self-determination did not justify terrorism, and Arab countries dropped their demands to a right to resist foreign occupation.

However, disagreements on how to define the Israeli-Palestinian conflict forced the EU to abandon a vision statement linking aid from the EU more directly to democratic, economic and political reforms in the Middle East.

"There's an agreement on a weaker compromise," one diplomat said.

The two-day EuroMed summit had already suffered from a low turnout among the Arab leaders. Only two of the 10 Mediterranean partners - Turkey and the Palestinians - sent their top officials.

Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika is in hospital for urgent medical tests, while the King of Jordan pulled out because of a government reshuffle. The presidents of Syria and Lebanon did not attend because they are in diplomatic quarantine over the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri.

The summit was meant to be the first time that the leaders of a group that includes Israelis and Palestinians, as well as the 25 EU countries, had met. Previous meetings of the Euro-Mediterranean group, launched in Barcelona 10 years ago, have been at foreign minister level.

Writing in Spain's El Pais newspaper today, Tony Blair and the Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said it was vital that the Barcelona summit succeeded in deepening EU-Mediterranean cooperation.

The foreign secretary Jack Straw, who attended the conference, said: "There is broad agreement on the issue of terrorism. Almost everybody round the room represents a country that has suffered from terrorism ... Everybody understands the need to fight it. But as ever, there is some negotiation over texts."