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from Newyork Times

PARIS — European leaders sharpened their tone over Tibet on Wednesday as officials considered sending a fact-finding mission to Beijing and a Chinese diplomat sought to defend the crackdown on protesters.
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France told a joint session of the House of Commons and the House of Lords during a state visit to Britain that Britain and France shared a responsibility to urge the Chinese leadership to respect human rights and cultural identity. That goal could only be achieved if there was “true dialogue” between China and the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, he said, speaking a day after hinting that France might boycott the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Beijing this summer.
French diplomats said they were in talks with other European capitals about dispatching a European Union delegation to China. France, which will take over the European Union’s presidency in July, will seek agreement on the issue during an informal foreign ministers’ meeting at the end of this week, said an official with knowledge of the draft proposal who would only speak on the condition of anonymity in advance of the meeting.
China reacted swiftly, comparing its handling of Tibetan protesters with a recent French police raid following rioting in the volatile Paris suburb of Villiers-Le Bel.
When asked whether China would accept an international fact-finding mission under the auspices of the European Union or the United Nations, China’s deputy ambassador in Paris, Qu Xing, told the French radio station Europe 1: “Would you allow a U.N. mission to see if all is well in Villiers-le-Bel?”
The prospect of the Olympics being held against a backdrop of Chinese military action in Tibet has forced European leaders to walk a narrow line between maintaining their increasingly important economic and political ties to China while protests among their own people against China’s actions in Tibet become ever more vocal and calls from leading figures in Europe’s former communist east growing louder.
The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, acknowledged the economic interests in an interview Wednesday in the newspaper Liberation, saying, ”We are constrained by a certain number of economic interests in order not to boost unemployment.”
Under pressure from the news media and human rights groups, more leaders are now considering defying China and meeting the Dalai Lama, and while none has supported an outright boycott of the Olympic Games in August, the possibility of not attending the opening ceremony is no longer ruled out.
The president of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering, on Wednesday invited the Dalai Lama to speak to European Union legislators and questioned whether European leaders should attend the opening.
Following the lead of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who met with the Dalai Lama last fall, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain announced last week that he would meet with the Dalai Lama when he visits London in May. Mr. Sarkozy hinted on Wednesday that he might do the same, saying through a spokesman that he would make a decision based on how the situation in Tibet evolved.
European media have given prominent coverage to the violence in Tibet and a number of leading figures from Eastern Europe with first-hand experience of living under a Communist regime have joined the growing chorus of outrage.
One appeal, signed by former anti-communist campaigners like Vaclav Havel who as Czech president received the Dalai Lama several times, called on the Chinese leadership to lift its restrictions on foreign journalists, release political prisoners and begin a dialogue with Tibet’s exiled leader. Otherwise, the appeal said, “the International Olympic Committee should seriously reconsider” holding this summer’s Olympic Games in China.
Mr. Sarkozy’s speech on Wednesday, which received a standing ovation from British lawmakers, was the formal centerpiece of an overnight visit during which he is apparently seeking to burnish his statesman’s credentials after a decline in the polls back home.
In the speech, he also said that France would submit a proposal to strengthen its military presence in the NATO force in Afghanistan at the NATO summit meeting planned for next week in Bucharest, Romania.
He did not go into detail about the size of French reinforcements. France has contributed around 1,900 soldiers to the 40,000-troop NATO force in Afghanistan, with most of the French troops based in Kabul rather than the more dangerous south.
Katrin Bennhold reported from Paris and Alan Cowell from London.