Verbatim report of proceedings

Thursday, 1 December 2016 - Brussels

US-EU Agreement on the protection of personal information relating to criminal offenses (A8-0354/2016 - Jan Philipp Albrecht)

  Martina Anderson and Lynn Boylan (GUE/NGL), in writing. – On Albrecht we voted against the report. We supported the referral of the file to the European Court of Justice to assess compatibility with existing EU data protection legislation.

The file itself provides for some additional protections but by no means goes far enough. It differentiates between EU and non-EU citizens, it would also mean that it would become more difficult to challenge the legality of data exchange in court. It may contradict existing EU data protection legislation. It doesn’t cover the protection of information exchanged between national security agencies or private entities either.

For those reasons we voted against.