MEPs approve SWIFT deal

Parliament votes in favour of bank data-sharing deal, but Greens say it does not do enough to protect EU citizens.

The European Parliament today approved a EU-US deal on sharing bank data to help track terrorist financing.  

MEPs voted by 484 in favour, 109 against and 12 abstentions to back the new accord, clearing the way for it to come into force on 1 August. The deal, known as SWIFT after the private company that handles electronic banking data, sets conditions for access to international banking transfer records from EU countries by the US Treasury’s Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme (TFTP).

Alexander Alvaro, a German liberal MEP who drafted the Parliament’s opinion on the accord, said the Parliament had won concessions from US and EU authorities that would better guarantee the rights of Europeans. “It manages to protect the security of our citizens,” said Alvaro.

The agreement was renegotiated after MEPs rejected it in February, claiming it did not offer enough data protection for EU citizens. The Parliament has powers to reject any international accords the EU signs with other parties.

A reworked accord was agreed on 28 June after changes were made to how the EU oversees the work of the US Treasury in examining bank transfers made by SWIFT. The changes mean that an EU official will be sent to the US to monitor and “when required” block access to the extraction of data from financial records by US authorities, said a Parliament report. This extra check is to prevent economic espionage and data mining.

The European Police Office (Europol) will be asked to review each US request for data to see if it complies with EU data protection rules, while the European Commission has promised to draft plans to set up an EU counterpart to the US TFTP within the next year. This is supposed to reduce the amount of bulk data sent to the US.

The Parliament can call for the termination of the EU-US accord after five years if such a European system is not set up by then.

While the three biggest political groups, the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats (ALDE), backed the accord, the Greens still had misgivings.

Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German green MEP, said there were “still fundamental” problems with data protection standards offered to EU citizens in the accord. He said the time US authorities can hold onto records, five years, was still too long.

The Greens have called on the Parliament’s civil liberties committee to ask for a formal legal opinion on whether the accord violates EU data protection rules.

José Manuel Barroso, president of the Commission, welcomed the Parliament’s approval, saying that it finds “the right balance between the need to guarantee the security of citizens against the threat of terrorism and the need to guarantee their fundamental rights”.

The Parliament’s rejection of the accord in February caught EU member states and the Commission off-guard.

The rejection led to the involvement of the US government in lobbying MEPs to change their minds. Joe Biden, the US vice-president, travelled to Brussels to appeal directly to MEPs not to reject it a second time, warning that the absence of the TFTP would leave a massive security gap that could be exploited by terrorists.

US reaction

Speaking in Washington, DC, US President Barack Obama said that a MEPs’ decision would restore the “important counter-terrorism tool” that was suspended when the Parliament said no to the interim deal in February.

“The threat of terrorism faced by the United States and the European Union continues and, with this agreement, all of our citizens will be safer,” the US president said.

Stuart A. Levey, the US secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said the data collected and analysed provided crucial details on the identity and location of people suspected of funding terror groups.

He said the tracking programme was more crucial than ever before because al-Qaeda was under “financial stress” and was dependent on money transfers from supporters.

The US government says the TFTP has provided “critical” investigative leads, including more than 1,550 to EU member states, since it was set up in 2001.

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