Verbatim report of proceedings

Thursday, 24 October 2013 - Strasbourg

Suspension of the SWIFT agreement as a result of NSA surveillance (B7-0467/2013, RCB7-0468/2013, B7-0468/2013, B7-0471/2013, B7-0472/2013, B7-0481/2013)

  Pino Arlacchi (S&D), in writing. − I voted for this resolution because I totally support the request to suspend the Agreement between the European Union and the US on the processing and transfer of Financial Messaging Data for the purposes of the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. I strongly believe that any transfer of personal data must comply with EU and Member State law and with fundamental rights obligations, including those relating to privacy and data protection. For this reason, given the reports of several newspapers, whereby documents were revealed that the NSA would have had access to the SWIFT banking data outside the framework of the EU-US TFTP agreement, I believe that the EU should urgently deliberate carefully on the human rights implications of any future data exchange alternatives which fully respect data protection principles, especially the necessity and proportionality test.