Members of the European Parliament have recently rejected a demand from the European Green Party which urged member nations’ governments to grant asylum to a well-known whistleblower Edward Snowden. The demand came during the adoption of a European Parliament Committee inquiry into the spying scandal of the National Security Agency of the USA.

The reason for rejection was not really that the MEPs didn’t like the former NSA agent, or what he did – it was rather due to a traditional problem of allowing the European Union to tell member states who they could allow into their country. According to Blighty’s Claude Moraes, member nations should always have the final say over who they let stay inside their borders. He explained that the European Union has actually no power to grant asylum as the European Union – it is rather something for individual countries. This is why the issue of asylum within the latest report can’t be a relevant issue for the European Union.

In the meantime, German Green MEP Jan-Philipp Albrecht slammed what he called the Parliament’s “lacklustre response” to the crisis of the national Security Agency. He believes the European Union has be doing a bit more to hack off the US for spying on European citizens and the best way to wind them up is to provide the whistleblower asylum.