Brussels, 19/09/2001 (Agence Europe) - In Washington on Thursday, the Union and the United States will be holding a long-planned meeting which will now focus (unsurprisingly) on fighting terrorism. The European Troika (Commissioner Chris Patten, the High Representative for CFSP, Javier Solana, and the President of the Council, Belgian Foreign Minister, Louis Michel) is also hoping to raise the issue of a possible joint initiative in the Middle East, where a new window of opportunity has just opened for relaunching the peace process. A joint statement is expected to crown the formal meeting scheduled for mid-morning (local time) with the Secretary of State Colin Powell - a first in the history of transatlantic ministerial relations. The day before, in Brussels, there was hope that the document would include a number of concrete measures to make it possible to extend anti-terrorist cooperation and make it more operational. For the EU side, cooperation with the US in this domain should also cover the causes of terrorism, police, justice (raising at an appropriate moment the obstacle of the application of the death penalty in the US, Ed), rejection of any type of support for terrorists, sanctions, border controls, access to and the exchange of relevant strategic information and arms control and non-proliferation of arms. Commissioner Chris Patten may also meet the White House chief adviser on security issues, Condoleeza Rice, with whom he is expected to raise the results of the discussions he has had with Mr Vitorino on gaps in current cooperation and how to bridge them, in areas such as cybercrime (combating money laundering), the exchange of "intelligence", extremist religious groups, state support for terrorists, terrorists' access to arms and other equipment (including financial aid, with a view to concrete implementation across the board of the UN Convention on the funding of terrorism and the strengthening of pressure on countries that allow the transfers of funds), mutual juridical assistance at transatlantic level, extending political dialogue to include legal experts and anti-terrorist officers, the opportunity of giving the future Eurojust body an international role and preparing the way for negotiating an cooperation agreement between the US anti-terrorist bodies and Europol (whose current mandate prioritises candidate countries and other countries with specific security problems such as Colombia or China).