Parliament Flexes New Muscles
Tuesday 06 July 2010By EU Reporter Correspondents
The Parliament has flexed it’s muscles over the SWIFT agreement rejecting the first draft of the text, forcing the council to go back to the negotiating table with the United States over the sharing of bank transfer data. Now, the latest draft is once again gracing the European Parliament with it's presence.
Indeed, the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties committee, voted on Monday, to approve the latest incarnation of the SWIFT agreement. While the plenary vote doesn’t take place until Thursday, today’s debate showed that barring some major event that would seek to ruin EU - US relations, the vote should approve the agreement.
The major groups in the parliament supported the agreement with the S&D group stating that the parliament had “successfully brokered […] strict safeguards” citing the EU appointment of EU staff in the US Treasury to oversee the use of the information provided to them.
The EPP, too, cited the “enhanced safeguards for EU citizens with regard to data protection, procedural guarantees and defence rights”.
The SWIFT agreement was one of the first uses of the Parliament’s new powers granted by the Lisbon Treaty and, while many will not see the current agreement as perfect, it provides an objectively better deal than the original agreement did in 2009.