VALENTINA POP
Opposition from four member states to a draft agreement
between the EU and US allowing the use of banking data in
anti-terrorist investigations is likely to delay a decision until after
1 December, drawing the European Parliament into the decision making
process.
[euobserver.com]
Citing data privacy concerns, Germany, Austria, France and Finland
are opposing the text negotiated by the Swedish EU presidency and the
European Commission allowing American authorities access to information
from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication
(Swift) – the interbank transfer service.
Since
2006, Swift had been in the centre of a major EU-US row, after it
emerged that the American authorities had been secretly using
information on European transactions as part of the so-called War on
Terror.
A Belgium-based company, Swift keeps a backup database on US soil,
which the Bush administration was using in the context of terrorist
investigations.
The company records international transactions worth trillions of
dollars daily, between nearly 8,000 financial institutions in over 200
countries. It is about to set up a Switzerland-based back-up database,
which will allow for the European information no longer to be stored in
the US, which is why the Obama administration is negotiating a legal
framework for data exchange with the EU, to enter into force next year.
The Swedish EU presidency was hoping to reach a deal done on 30
November, when EU justice and home affairs ministers are set to meet in
Brussels.
But German justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a
liberal politician, said she was against a deal which allowed large
quantities of data to be transferred without "legal protection
provisions" in place, she told the Berliner Zeitung on Thursday (12
November).
Her comments were echoed by Austrian interior minister Maria Fekter, who said she would also oppose the deal.
According to the draft proposal, the EU would allow Swift to share
the "name, account number, address, national identification number, and
other personal data" with US authorities, if there is a suspicion that
the person is in any way involved with terrorist activity.
The requests for information "shall be tailored as narrowly as
possible" to prevent too much customer data from being evaluated by
police and intelligence officers.
However, if the provider of data "cannot identify the data that
would respond to the request for technical reasons, all potentially
relevant data shall be transmitted in bulk" to the state that requests
it. Eurjust, the bloc’s judicial co-operation agency, is also set to be
informed by the information request.
The transmitted data may be kept in the US for up to five years before being deleted.
Postponing a decision on the deal beyond 30 November will have other
legal implications, as the European Parliament will have a bigger say
in the decision-making process once the Lisbon Treaty enters into force
on 1 December.
A sneak preview of the EU legislature’s co-decision right in the
field of justice and home affairs was offered on Thursday, when a joint
session of the parliament’s three legal committees tabled almost 500
amendments to a resolution in this area.
One MEP asked for the vote to be postponed, as not all amendments
had been translated in time for all his colleagues to read, which meant
that some would not know what they were voting on. His request was
rejected and the resolution approved after over two hours of voting.
