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ROUNDUP: EU parliament approves SWIFT deal with US Eds: Adds quotes from EU lawmaker, EU commission and details, corrects voting result: 109 against sted of 190

Other News Materials 8 July 2010 18:53 (UTC +04:00)
The European Parliament on Thursday allowed the United States to resume searches through European Union citizens' bank data in the hunt for terrorist financing, as it approved the so-called SWIFT deal, dpa reported.
ROUNDUP: EU parliament approves SWIFT deal with US Eds: Adds quotes from EU lawmaker, EU commission and details, corrects voting result: 109 against sted of 190

The European Parliament on Thursday allowed the United States to resume searches through European Union citizens' bank data in the hunt for terrorist financing, as it 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.

"We have achieved major improvements on what we criticised last time," said Alexander Alvaro, the German liberal parliamentarian who drafted the house's report on SWIFT.

Voting in Strasbourg, France, deputies overwhelmingly backed the revised agreement, with 484 in favour, 109 against and 12 abstentions.

Some "80 per cent of the members voted in favour ... and I think we should see that as a very big victory," said Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU Home Affairs Commissioner who conducted talks with the US.

At stake is access to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a Europe-based private consortium which records financial transactions.

US investigators, working on a terrorist financing tracking programme launched after the September 11, 2001 attacks, had freely used a server SWIFT had 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 February vote cancelled that green-light. In the ensuing months the US could still request data, but using more cumbersome procedures, leading EU and US officials to speak of an emerging "security gap.

Deputies dug their heels in mainly because 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.

In addition, the assembly saw to it that an EU official would be placed in the US Treasury in Washington to scrutinise and potentially block the handing over of data.

Malmstrom told the German Press Agency dpa a supervisor would be appointed shortly on an interim basis, so that the SWIFT agreement could enter into force as planned on August 1.

Procedures for choosing a permanent EU supervisor still have to be discussed, with parliament likely to insist on having a big say on the matter.

The rejection of the first SWIFT deal was seen as a showcase of the assembly's increased powers under the Lisbon Treaty, the EU's new rulebook which came into force in December.

In June, deputies again flexed their muscles when they told the commission that the draft revised deal it had agreed with the US was still not sufficient, forcing a reopening of the talks.

As a result of last-minute changes, parliamentarians also extracted a commitment from the commission and EU member states that a SWIFT-data-extraction process would be set up in Europe within the next three years, so that the US would no longer receive data in bulk.

However, smaller parties were still critical.

Rui Tavares said his European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) group would turn to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to have the SWIFT deal struck down again.

He argued that giving Europol oversight powers is "absurd, illegal and unconstitutional" because the agency "has a clear interest in the results of any transfers."

"If they do it, we would probably join them," German deputy Jan Philipp Albrecht told dpa, speaking for the Green group. But Malmstrom was confident the agreement would stand up to scrutiny.

"We have been assured by all our legal assistants that this is a robust, legal, sustainable solution," she told reporters. dpa alv jbl Author: Alvise Armellini

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