EP clears way for reworked SWIFT deal

The SWIFT deal, which is named 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,” Alvaro was quoted as saying..

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 2010 after changes were made to how the EU oversaw the work of the US Treasury in examining bank transfers made by SWIFT.

The changes meant that an EU official would be sent to the United States to monitor and "when required” block access to the extraction of data from financial records by US authorities, according to an EP report. This extra check was introduced in the new deal “to prevent economic espionage and data mining”.

Under the terms of the revised agreement, Europol would be asked to review each US request for data to see if it complied with EU data protection rules.

The European Commission had also promised to draft plans to set up an EU counterpart to the US TFTP within the next year. This was supposed to reduce the amount of bulk data sent to the US.

The Parliament could call for the termination of the EU-US accord after five years if such a European system was 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 and voted against.

Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German green MEP, was quoted as saying there were “still fundamental” problems with data protection standards offered to EU citizens in the accord.

He insisted that the time US authorities could hold onto records, five years, was still too long.

The Greens had called on the Parliament's civil liberties committee to ask for a formal legal opinion on whether the accord violated 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”.

Speaking in Washington, DC, US President Barack Obama was quoted as saying that the 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,” Obama added.