The European Parliament on Thursday allowed the United States to resume searches though European Union citizens' bank data in the hunt for terrorist financing, as they approved the so-called SWIFT deal, DPA reported.
EU lawmakers had rejected a first version of the agreement in February over concerns about privacy, but agreed after extracting key concessions on data protection as the deal was re-negotiated with the US.
Voting in Strasbourg, France, deputies backed the revised agreement by a large majority, with 484 in favour, 190 against and 12 abstentions.
At stake is access to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) database, a Europe-based private consortium which records financial transactions.
US investigators had freely searched it until last year, using a SWIFT server in the US. Its closure in January raised the necessity of an EU-US agreement to let the searches continue.
EU governments gave clearance in late November, but parliament's negative vote cancelled that green-light.
Deputies' criticism focused on the fact that SWIFT technology does not allow for suspicious transactions to be singled out from bulk data, meaning that there is no way to prevent information relating to innocent EU citizens from being transferred and stored in the US for up to five years.
But under the revised SWIFT deal, information requests are to be "tailored as narrowly as possible" and will checked by Europol, the EU's police coordination agency.
The assembly also saw to it that an EU official would be placed in Washington to scrutinise the hand over of SWIFT data to investigators in the US treasury.
In addition, it extracted a commitment from the European Commission and EU member states that a SWIFT-data-extraction process would be set up in Europe within the next three years, so that in the medium term the US would no longer receive data in bulk.