EU relaunches talks with US on sharing bank data

The Commission and the EU's member states are looking to replace arrangements for sharing bank data that were thrown out by the European Parliament in February, amid concerns about data privacy.

The US is anxious for an early restoration of its access to data on bank transfers made through SWIFT, an international banking co-operative.

The MEPs' vote in February cut off the US Treasury's access to such data, which the US administration said was essential for tracking the funding of terrorism.

The Commission has prepared a draft mandate, which is supposed to address the MEPs' concerns, and this will be discussed by the interior ministers when they meet in Luxembourg next Thursday (22 April).

Spain, the current holder of the rotating presidency of the Council of Ministers, is eager to conclude the agreement by the end of June, a goal shared by the US. A number of other member states are also pushing for a quick agreement because they fear that Parliament's rejection has created a security gap.

Viviane Reding, the European commissioner for justice, and Cecilia Malmström, the commissioner for home affairs, discussed the forthcoming negotiations with Janet Napolitano, the US secretary of homeland security, and Eric Holder, the US attorney general, in Madrid last week (8-9 April).

According to the draft mandate, transfer requests from the US Treasury will have to be approved by a designated judicial authority in the EU, whose specifics are as yet undefined. The Commission wants to ensure that EU citizens have the same administrative and judicial redress as US citizens against any misuse of their data, which could prove complex in practice. It also wants to prohibit data-mining, that is, the wholesale search of vast databases for patterns, or checking them against other data sets. It insists that the data be used only for terrorism investigations. The mandate also foresees the possibility of establishing a European scheme modelled on the US Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme (TFTP), the programme that receives the SWIFT data.

Alexander Alvaro, a German Liberal MEP, said that the main concern of many MEPs was the transfer of bulk data to the US Treasury. Under current rules, SWIFT cannot extract data relating to a single transaction but transfers entire data packets to the US, where individual entries are then extracted. Alvaro suggested that an EU-TFTP, which would extract the queried data and transfer them to the US, might be a way to address the problem. Manfred Weber, a German Christian Democrat, said: “We have explained to our American partners in a very friendly manner that European data need to be governed by European rules.”

? Justice ministers will on 23 April discuss a Spanish proposal for a European protection order that would provide victims of violence with the same level of protection in all EU member states. Under the proposal, restraining orders issued by one member state would apply across the EU. The upper chamber of the German parliament, the Bundesrat, believes, however, that the proposal violates the principle of subsidiarity.

The European Parliament is tentatively scheduled to vote on the protection order proposal in June. If the proposal is adopted in first reading, a qualified majority of EU member states is sufficient for the proposal to become law.