Next week, the European Parliament will consider an unlikely, last-ditch effort to grant Edward Snowden protection against criminal prosecution and/or extradition to the United States.

The first amendment (PDF) to Resolution A7-0139 would “call on the EU Member States to drop criminal charges, if any, against Edward Snowden and to grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as a whistleblower and international human rights defender.”

This amendment was previously rejected by the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs (LIBE) in February, but it will be brought back before the entire parliament at its upcoming March 12 session in Strasbourg.

Early Friday morning, the committee published the American whistleblower’s full 12-page written testimony. (Top American officials, including the director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Keith Alexander, declined the committee’s invitation to submit testimony.)

On March 12, the European Parliament will vote on this resolution, which, among other things, will call for a prohibition on “blanket mass surveillance,” a new “European Digital Habeas Corpus,” and “a [2015] conference with the intelligence oversight bodies of European national parliaments.”

“If we really want to get the truth on the table, there’s only one way that we can do this, and that’s granting Snowden protection in an EU state, protecting him from prosecution or from extradition,” Jan-Phillip Albrecht, Member of European Parliament (MEP) from Germany, told Ars. Albrecht is also an outspoken member of the LIBE committee and openly supports bringing Snowden to Europe, ideally Germany.

“I don’t really care about the way of how we protect him from prosecution or extradition, because it’s absolutely essential to learn about surveillance and infringements in the EU, in the US—wherever [this is happening] in Western democracies,” he added. “We cannot leave him in the hands of Vladimir Putin and Russian authorities. This should be the main consequence that we draw on [Snowden’s] information.”

Albrecht also told Ars that many European lawmakers are afraid that if one member state does grant Snowden asylum or some other type of similar legal protection (such as passing this amendment), President Obama will pull out of the upcoming US-EU summit scheduled in Brussels later this month or take further action that could harm individual member states’ interests.

While Albrecht doesn’t believe that this Snowden amendment will pass, he still has hope that his home country, Germany, could use existing laws to sidestep the thorny issue of asylum.

“The [German] parliament [could use] the opportunity to grant him protection as a witness in a parliamentary inquiry, so there wouldn’t need to be the government granting him protection via asylum or citizenship,” Albrecht said.

“Then we can talk further. That’s what we as Greens in the German parliament, and at the same time at the EU parliament, are simply asking for. We’re asking for him to be brought to the EU, or it could be Berlin, to have the opportunity and the witness protection to give evidence and testimony, and then we can talk further [about asylum or other measures].”

“The front page of every newspaper in the world stands open to you.”

In his written testimony, Edward Snowden slammed the American-led bulk data collection program, forcefully arguing that if left unchecked, “the inevitable result will be states that are both less liberal and less safe.”

He warned that his answers would not disclose any new information, as he preferred to leave such decisions in the hands of the journalists that have access to the documents he has already provided.

Still, Snowden called the intelligence-sharing regime a “European bazaar,” where individual European countries make separate deals with the NSA that ultimately are self-defeating. He said that these agreements, with unenforceable restrictions, allow American spies to tap, say, German fiber on the condition that it doesn’t conduct searches on Germans, and it will broker a similar deal in Denmark, for instance.

“Yet the two tapping sites may be two points on the same cable, so the NSA simply captures the communications of the German citizens as they transit Denmark and the Danish citizens as they transit Germany, all the while considering it entirely in accordance with their agreements,” he wrote. “Ultimately, each EU national government's spy services are independently hawking domestic accesses to the NSA, GCHQ, FRA, and the like without having any awareness of how their individual contribution is enabling the greater patchwork of mass surveillance against ordinary citizens as a whole.”

The GCHQ, or Government Communications Headquarters, is the British equivalent of the NSA, while the FRA is the Swedish equivalent.

“Just as we do not allow police officers to enter every home to fish around for evidence of undiscovered crimes, we must not allow spies to rummage through our every communication for indications of disfavored activities,” he added.

Some in the American government have criticized Snowden for not observing the chain-of-command for reporting problems that he observed within the NSA.

But Snowden also said he reported “these clearly problematic problems to more than ten distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them. As an employee of a private company rather than a direct employee of the US government, I was not protected by US whistleblower laws, and I would not have been protected from retaliation and legal sanction for revealing classified information about lawbreaking in accordance with the recommended process.”

He noted that the US Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act and the Presidential Policy Directive 19 “exempted Intelligence Community contractors such as myself. The result was that individuals like me were left with no proper channels.”

In response to a question about the “potential to put at risk lives of innocents” as the result of his disclosures, Snowden had a forceful response:

Actually, no specific evidence has ever been offered, by any government, that even a single life has been put at risk by the award-winning journalism this question attempts to implicate. The ongoing revelations about unlawful and improper surveillance are the product of a partnership between the world's leading journalistic outfits and national governments, and if you can show one of the governments consulted on these stories chose not to impede demonstrably fatal information from being published, I invite you to do so. The front page of every newspaper in the world stands open to you.

Finally, Snowden again re-iterated his desire to receive safe passage or permanent asylum in an EU country, “but I recognize that would require an act of extraordinary political courage.”