EU Parliament asks for postponement of US SWIFT data-sharing deal

Jan 21, 2010, 15:58 GMT

Strasbourg, France - The European Parliament is set to ask European Union governments to hold off on the SWIFT agreement to share bank transfers data with the United States until it has ruled on the matter, the legislature's president Jerzy Buzek announced on Thursday.

'I am going to send a new letter to the Council to ask for a delay until the parliament gives its opinion, say until February 15,' Buzek told journalists in Strasbourg after a meeting of the leaders of the legislature's political groups.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is a Belgium-based consortium owned by banks and financial institutions that records every international money transfer. Its database is often useful for anti-terrorism investigations, particularly in the wake of the attempted suicide bomb attack on a US-bound plane in December.

In 2006 it emerged that US agencies secretly used SWIFT data from a server the company held in Virginia, raising concerns in the EU about privacy rights. Since December 31 the information was moved to servers in Switzerland and the Netherlands, requiring an agreement to be struck between the EU and US on continued access to the database.

EU ministers of justice green lighted an interim deal on November 30, supposed to come into force on February 1 and to run until the end of 2010, when a permanent agreement is due to have been concluded.

But they did not give the text to the parliament which, since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty in December, gained more oversight powers on justice matters.

'We have not been involved, and this is unacceptable,' the Socialist group leader, Martin Schulz, railed on Wednesday in an angry parliamentary debate with a representative of Spain, the EU's current rotating presidency.

Spanish undersecretary for EU affairs Diego Lopez Garrido promised deputies (MEPs) they will receive the document on Monday, explaining it was delayed due to the need to translate it in all EU languages.

Buzek said the legislature's justice committee is set to start examining the agreement on Tuesday, in order to give an opinion before the MEPs' final vote 'on February 9 or 10.'

That might coincide with a vote of confidence on the new EU executive, led by Jose Manuel Barroso, scheduled for February 9. 'Barroso's behaviour on the SWIFT case will influence the evaluation of his commission,' warned green group leader Danny Cohn-Bendit.