Apparently referring to recent reports of extensive phone surveillance in France and Spain by the N.S.A., he said European intelligence services had themselves collected phone records in war zones and other areas outside their borders and shared them with the United States.

Europe’s involvement in the spying game was given further credence by a former foreign minister of Greece, Theodoros Pangalos, who told a Greek radio station that his country’s intelligence services had listened in on the phone conversations of American ambassadors to Greece and Turkey in the 1990s, The Associated Press reported.

In addition to what seemed to be the leaders’ reluctance to rein in too sharply activities countenanced by their own spy agencies, Europe’s slow-track approach to tightening the rules on privacy protection has faced a host of other hurdles.

The proposed legislation in the European Parliament met with fierce opposition from business groups in the United States and Europe. There were also concerns that the issue would complicate negotiations on a wide-ranging trade agreement between Europe and the United States, a pact that many European leaders champion as an important lever to help lift Europe’s sluggish economic growth.

Many members of the current Parliament and officials at the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, had wanted to push the law through before next summer. Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Parliament member who is in the vanguard of that push, said the summit meeting decision showed that Germany, the bloc’s weightiest economic and political power, had been eclipsed by other nations in protecting privacy.

“The Germans are not on the forefront when it comes to better privacy protection for its citizens, but the French, Italians and Spanish are,” said Mr. Albrecht, who spoke by telephone from Washington.

Peter Schaar, the German federal data protection commissioner and a longtime critic of relatively lax American data privacy policies, took European leaders to task for delaying the proposed legislation. “Whoever delays this reform is endangering it in an irresponsible way,” said Mr. Schaar, appealing “also to our government” for deeds, not words.