. HUMPHRYS: This week, Europe's heads of government are meeting in Finland to talk about new ways of cracking down on crime and illegal immigration. Sounds fairly uncontroversial, but it's not. Some of the measures being proposed would include, for instance, a Europe-wide arrest warrant so you could be arrested in Britain for an offence committed anywhere on the Continent. As Paola Buonadonna reports, the worry is that the police and the judges might gain power, at the expense of the citizen. NEWS REPORTS: Bridget Seisay has been convicted of trying to smuggle an illegal immigrant into Britain. She insists she's innocent, her lawyers say she's the victim of a miscarriage of justice. As she was led handcuffed into court, Bridget Seisay knew this was her last chance to avoid spending the next three years in prison. Bridget Seisay was acquitted after the judge ruled that a proper investigation hadn't been carried out and the authorities had failed to produce any substantial evidence. BRIDGET SEISAY: The past seven months have been a nightmare for me. PAOLA BUONADONNA: Back together with her young son and her husband, Bridget Seisay is trying to forget her ordeal. She was arrested last year leaving Brussels after a chance encounter with a woman travelling with false documents. Because she is British and not Belgian, she was repeatedly denied bail. SEISAY: I feel very cheated and nothing can undo the damage. I have been separated for seven months from my family and I thought when I come back things would settle down easily. I am so unfocussed and I think, and I keep getting the flashback. HABIB TEJAN: It was a total nightmare, devastating, especially looking at my little boy waking up at three o'clock in the morning and saying, "I want mummy." BUONADONNA: Of course, miscarriages of justice occur in every country of the European Union. Next week EU leaders meet in Tampere, Finland, for the first ever summit devoted to justice and home affairs. But there's concern that there will be to much stress on tougher law enforcement and stricter asylum rules, and not enough on ensuring that ordinary citizens can expect a decent standard of justice anywhere in the Union. STEPHEN JAKOBI: There are already over a thousand Britons in the jails of Europe. We must make sure their rights are respected before we crack down on crime and indeed create many more Brits in the jails of Europe. GRAHAM WATSON MEP: I'm afraid that the emphasis of our social democratic governments is sometimes a little more angled towards the security side and a bit less towards the side of justice for the citizen. CLAUDE MORAES MEP: It is critical to crush crime, particularly because it knows no borders now, drug crime, pornography, all sorts of crimes which respect no borders need to be clamped down upon, and the EU and the integration project is important in doing that. BUONADONNA: The concerns of EU Governments are understandable. Cross border crimes, such as drug smuggling, money laundering and human trafficking are soaring, up until now, the fight against crime and inducts to justice have remained almost completely under national control, despite the single market and the single currency. The Tampere summit will be a milestone in the EU's approach to justice matters. According to the newly ratified Amsterdam Treaty, from now on some decisions on police and judicial corporation and common rules on asylum and immigration will be drafted by the EU institutions. This is a delicate area which touches on the sovereignty of all EU countries. Apart from a commitment to fight money laundering and some talk of strengthening Europol, EU governments have quite different ideas about how to make progress. In the fight against crime, some countries like France, Italy, Spain and Finland, would like to see a degree of harmonisation of criminal and civil law. And have even called for an EU Public Prosecutor for certain crimes. Britain prefers to see mutual recognition of each other's practices and judgements, and even an EU Warrant of Arrest which would eventually lead to automatic extraditions. So an EU country investigating a crime would be able to ask British Police to freeze the British suspect's bank account, summon him as a witness, or arrest him, and the request would be automatically granted. Britain could ask the same of other member countries. MORAES: The problems with mutual recognition occur when a citizen of the United Kingdom faces a different legal system in the EU and they may not get the benefits of protection and justice in another system, or have a similar standard, and when that happens you can see the weaknesses of the mutual recognition approach. BUONADONNA: That's one of the reasons why France argues that for a limited number of crimes, a common charge, joint investigative procedures and perhaps a harmonised sentencing system would be better. ELISABETH GUIGOU: (Interpreted) If you are talking about organised crime, and I take this case alone, mutual recognition is not enough, because mutual recognition means that if there is movement between countries, things take too much time. So in this case I say that we have to ask ourselves how we can bring the laws closer together and we may want to do this in other areas. What I would like is for the Commission to be asked to identify the areas where this is absolutely essential. ANTONIO VITORINO: I would say that we are not asking for full harmonisation of penal codes or of penal law, that's out of the question, but we think that in some very specific areas, for instance, the trafficking on human beings, of crimes against children, we can see that there is no reason, nor political, nor philosophical reason, for not having a common incrimination and common penalties in all member states, so to show to the criminals that there is no place to hide in the European Union for those who commit such crimes. BUONADONNA: Whichever approach prevails, civil liberties campaigners want reassurances that tougher measures on crime like the Euro-warrant would be coupled with stronger guarantees for people who end up in prison abroad. They argue that foreigners often find themselves discriminated against with inadequate interpretation facilities, no legal aid and no bail. WATSON: I think it's very important that if we're having Euro-warrants, if we're allowing people to be arrested cross-border, that we also have Euro-bail, that if somebody is arrested in a country that is not their home, and the offence is bailable they can serve their bail in their own home country. That would prevent people being locked up for seven, eight, nine, ten months and more sometimes, far away from their family and friends, away from a lawyer who speaks their language and so on. JAKOBI: We need a Euro-bail system. under which people can be sent home to await trial and will get bail according to their own native code. Nothing has been done about this, and we've been hammering governments for six years to get something done and even the basic research is not there. BUONADONNA: Bridget Seisay said she found the Belgian legal system confusing, and the interpretation in court was poor, but her husband and her British lawyer also think that she was targeted because of her race. Even member states' growing preoccupation with illegal asylum seekers. They ignored her pleas that her young son would suffer without her. TEJAN: A lot of white people have said to me...."If Bridget had been white this would not have happened, it would not have lasted this long, and someone would have cleared the whole issue in a matter of day or weeks, but never months". BUONADONNA: Tampere will look at the creation of common EU rules to discourage illegal immigration and rationalise asylum procedures in the fifteen states. Germany wants to see a more even allocation of asylum seekers across the EU, but there are concerns that common rules will turn the Union into fortress Europe and may lower guarantees for people in genuine need . WATSON: The main concern is that governments may be trying to back away from their commitment in the nineteen-fifty-one Geneva Convention to grant asylum as a human right, and they may be trying to move the debate a little so that it becomes asylum at political discretion. That is something I would very much regret and I believe that my committee would fight very strongly against. MORAES: When we move towards that kind of co-operation we need to ensure that that co-operation doesn't just mean creating a fortress Europe, it doesn't just mean clamping down, although it's important to ensure that illegal immigration is minimised. It also means ensuring that common standards apply and that we don't descend into a downward spiral, so common arrangements yes, but not descending into a downward spiral in terms of standards for those who are genuinely seeking asylum across the EU. BUONADONNA: But the constant pressure on EU borders symbolised by the mass exodus of Albanians towards the Italian coast means member states tend to focus on ways of reducing illegal immigration in bogus asylum seekers. They're all including Britain expecting to agree to Euro-dac a finger-printing data base of asylum seekers. The Commission wants this to be accompanied by safeguards. VITORINO: Europe cannot be the big brother, European big brother, and so it's necessary to guarantee three things, judicial review and judiciary control, democratic control and the function of Euro-dac, and personal data guarantees which means the right to have access to the files and to correct the files that Euro-dac will contain. BUONADONNA: The temporary summit also aims to create an area of freedom, security and justice for EU citizens, looking at ways of making it easier for people to obtain justice in cross-border civil and family law cases. There is also talk of an EU charter of rights but no agreement or concrete plan on how this would work in practice. GUIGOU: (INTERPRETED) What we'd like to ascertain is whether collective rights exist which are not covered by European legislation already and which we, the countries of the European Union, after all we are rich nations compared to the rest of the world, would like to see entrenched, and so we do not want a purely governmental approach. WATSON: I think what's important though is what the governments want to do with the charter at the end. Some of them including the British government are just saying: Well, there will be a solemn declaration of this charter. My experience is that citizens' freedoms are not much enhanced by solemn declaration, that unless we write the charter into the next European Treaty then we will not have the kind of legal and democratic safeguards that we need. BUONADONNA: Nobody doubts that something needs to be done at EU level to crack down on crime and regulate asylum and immigration. On the other hand legislators are worried that the secrecy which surrounds the decision making in this area may lead to bad laws. They want to ensure that the balance is struck between enforcing the law and upholding the rights of all EU citizens. WATSON: Up until now all of the co-operation between governments in these areas has taken place behind closed doors. The European Commission hasn't had a look in, the European parliament hasn't had a look in, let alone the press or the public. Clearly from now on we want to see the European parliament involved, we want to see governments justify the decisions they are taking in public hearings. JAKOBI: Let me illustrate the basic problem we've got. I went to see a Spanish senior civil servant responsible for the agenda when I was in Madrid in July and we discussed the problem of legal aid and I asked the question: why is legal aid for civil matters on the agenda and legal aid for criminal matters off it. And he said, ."Because they are criminals of course". And the real problem is if you've got the civil servants creating this agenda for prime ministers who are all so gung-ho law and order they forget that there is a presumption of innocence. BUONADONNA: Bridget Seisay says that the Belgian authorities assumed she was guilty from the beginning. She and her family suffered a traumatic experience which they would not wish on anyone. TEJAN: It's the capital of Europe isn't it, and for someone to be treated in such an appalling manner in a country like Belgium just makes you wonder, I mean what's Europe going to be. I mean what protection are people going to have in Europe? BUONADONNA: Little Habib doesn't know it but this is one of the questions the EU leaders are supposed to address next week in Tampere. The summit will decide what rights he'll eventually enjoy as a citizen of the Union.