EU mandates talks with US on continued bank-data monitoring

Jul 27, 2009, 16:05 GMT

Brussels - The European Union should negotiate a deal with the United States on sharing information on bank transfers to fight terrorism, EU foreign ministers agreed Monday as they tasked the bloc's executive with opening talks.

The agreement is likely to be welcomed by law-enforcement officials on both sides of the Atlantic, but to outrage data-protection advocates who argue that it is a breach of privacy.

The international system for bank transfers known as SWIFT, which is currently run by computers housed in the US, is set to move most of its servers to Europe in a bid to protect users' privacy.

But US anti-terror agencies, who have hitherto been able to use some of the SWIFT data to track terrorist financing because the computers holding those data were on their territory, want to keep that access - a request the EU's executive supports.

The data-sharing system has led to information of 'significant value' in the fight against terrorism, the European Commission said in a recent statement.

To keep that system going after the SWIFT servers move home, the EU and US will have to agree a new information-sharing contract. If, as it hopes, the EU brings the Lisbon Treaty into force in 2010, the European Parliament will have to approve the deal.

But the treaty is not set to come into force until the end of the year at the earliest, leaving a gap of several months while the SWIFT servers are already in Europe but the US cannot access them.

Any such wait could cause a 'security gap,' the commission said.

Monday's decision therefore mandates the commission to begin talks on an interim data-sharing agreement with the US, to last until the treaty is in force and the two sides have drawn up a new deal with the parliament's backing.