The Europol headquarters in The Hague | Lex Van Lieshout/EPA | Lex van Lieshout/EPA Parliament approves new Europol powers to fight terrorism Pan-European agency will beef up EU efforts, but still has no investigative authority.

STRASBOURG — The European Parliament on Wednesday approved new powers for the law enforcement agency Europol in an effort to boost the EU’s ability to fight terrorism and improve intelligence-sharing among its member countries.

The new regulation is the result of three years of negotiations but gained a lot of its momentum and support in the wake of recent terror attacks in Paris and Brussels. It pushes EU countries to provide the agency with more relevant information, and makes it easier for Europol to set up specialized units on terrorism.

The agency is also expected to step up its “Internet referral unit” to combat online terrorist propaganda, meaning it can work with social media providers like Facebook to remove material aimed at recruiting foreign fighters.

The measure provides a new legal framework for Europol that includes strengthening Parliament’s scrutiny over the agency, establishing training and exchange programs for its staff, and ensuring that the agency benefits from a solid data protection system. But despite the changes, the agency remains mainly an information-sharing tool, and it still does not have investigative powers.

“We must respond to the need of our citizens for more safety,” Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European commissioner for migration and home affairs, told MEPs in a speech prior to the plenary vote. “And this is what we try to do through this reform.”

Europol, Avramopoulos said, will be “more accountable and will work in full respect of our data protection rules.”

Europol, which started in The Hague in 1994 as an EU drugs unit, has no powers of arrest and its mission of coordinating information between EU security services on organized crime and terrorism has been hampered by national governments’ reluctance to share information.

By the day of the Brussels attacks in March, many of the EU’s 28 members had still not registered foreign fighters on the Europol Information System, its main database on crime.

The agency also launched a European Counter Terrorism Center in January, a tool which will boost its capacity to monitor the internet and gather data on terrorism financing, arms trafficking and the surveillance of foreign fighters.

On Tuesday, the main rapporteur on the text, Agustín Díaz de Mera García Consuegra, from the European People’s Party, said the new regulation would give the agency “more possibilities to act.”

But other MEPs said the measure fell short by not providing Europol with more investigative powers, as well as a requirement for countries to share law-enforcement information.

“It would be good to have Europol be able to get more investigative information from the member states and I would have liked to see obligatory exchange of information from member states,” Morten Helveg Petersen, a member of the liberal ALDE party, told MEPs during the plenary debate. “Member states should not be able to retain information that could be of use to other member states.”