Malta silent on EU plan to grant Israel

The initiative launched by Brussels as a so called ‘silent procedure’ is a way of formally adopting texts. If no amendments are proposed (if no one 'breaks the silence') before the deadline of the procedure, the text is considered adopted by all participants.

Often, this procedure is the last step in adopting the text, and 'breaking the silence' is only a last resort in case a participant still has fundamental problems with parts of the text and is therefore the exception rather than the rule.

Malta has reportedly raised no objection, and no information was given as to what Malta’s position is on the matter, except that it was part of a data protection working party that expressed the opinion that “Israel guarantees an adequate level of protection on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data.”

Questions raised by MaltaToday have received no clear answers, while it remains unknown if the matter was discussed earlier this month between Foreign minister Tonio Borg and Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman in talks held in Valletta.

Speaking in Dublin last Monday, Irish justice minister Dermott Ahern said that since Israel allegedly used forged Irish passports to carry out the hit on Hamas official Mohammed al-Mahbouh in Dubai, “Israel should not be allowed access to this data.”

Israel has not admitted a role in the assassination carried out in Dubai last February that caused international anger over alleged Mossad agents who travelled to the Emirate with false EU passports.

Under a plan put forward at the beginning of the year, the European organizations for protecting individuals privacy, agreed that Israeli companies and European companies should be able to exchange information about customers.

This would mean that an Israeli customer of a local cell phone company, would be able to use his phone to connect to the internet in any EU country, while the European telecom company would be able to receive his personal data from his provider and charge his account accordingly.

The same would go for people owning European cell phones in Israel who wanted to use Israeli networks.
In addition, multinational corporations would be able to entrust Israeli companies to secure their databases, as the data could be stored on servers in Israel.

Information about employees could be passed freely between European and Israeli branches of the same company.
In agreeing to grant this access, the European Commission ruled that “Israel had proper information protection systems in place.”

However, the plan of sharing such data with Israel still needs to be ratified by the government of each individual Member State, including Malta before it could come into force.

According to the EU, the plan is “also intended to make it easier for authorities to detect cases of money laundering”, adding that it is considered to be “one of the last remaining trade barriers with Europe.”

Currently, the exchange of data between Israel and Europe is dependent on explicit contracts that are considered to be quite ludicrous for lawyers