The German Justice Minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, has let it be known that Berlin will attempt to stop a proposed EU bank information transfer to the US. Similar sentiment has been expressed by the Austrian interior minister Maria Fekter, who said she would also oppose the deal. Because of privacy concerns France and Finland are also opposing the proposed agreement.
The German minister is critical on both its timing and its substance. She wants to distance Germany from the “SWIFT” agreement and says it is unfortunate that the EU is trying to rail-road this through according to the <<old rules>> just days before the Lisbon Treaty is activated. Postponement of the deal beyond 30 November will have the legal implication that the European Parliament will have a bigger say in the decision-making process once the Lisbon Treaty enters into force on 1 December.
She also has problems with the substance of the deal and remains critical of how the extent of information transferred to the US will affect account holders whose data has been recorded and their lack of legal recourse.
At the present time a Belgium-based company, called “SWIFT” has kept a backup database in the US, which the Bush administration set up to keep track of “terrorist investigations”. The company records international bank transactions for trillions of dollars everyday in over 200 countries. It is planning to open a Switzerland-based data-centre, which will mean that the European information will no longer have to be stored in the US. The Obama administration wants to negotiate a legal framework for data exchange with the EU.
Since 2006, SWIFT has been in the centre of a major EU-US row because the American government has been secretly using information on European bank transactions as part of the so-called “War on Terror” – a left-over from the dis-credited Bush presidency.
The so-called “ War on Terror” -the failed misnomer of a hardly literate president – became a stock characterization, a finger-print of the Bush administration to justify any number of illegal activities at home and abroad. It was also used to snoop on its allies and it seems that this policy has since then been comprehensively discarded by the Obama administration
Tags: european union, germany, usa
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