This week the ‘SWIFT agreement’ was rejected by the European Parliament by 378 votes to 196. If this agreement was accepted it would have legally endorsed a deal between the US and the EU on the transfer of personal financial information that is in the ‘SWIFT’ system from the EU to the US authorities.
Photo: Olivier Hansen
SWIFT is a system which exchanges information between banks. The vast majority of international bank transfers go through this system. The data involved is therefore huge; millions of transfers which includes a mine of personal information about ordinary people from over 200 countries go through it every day.
The Obama administration and the EU Commission tried to claim that this proposal would be a boost in preventing terrorism. In reality it is simply another use of the threat of terrorism as a pretext to undermine civil liberties.
A leaked confidential report by an experienced French anti terrorist judge (and supporter of the right wing UMP party), Jean Louis Bruguière stated that there has been no evidence presented that even one case of terrorism has been prevented or prosecuted based on the financial data alone.
The proposed deal would have allowed the US agencies access data in the SWIFT system more or less at will. The data would then be held under US law. The information could be retained for 5 years and potentially up to 90 years in some cases! The US would also be able to transfer the data to 3rd countries. Due to the way in which the SWIFT system is run it is not possible for the authorities to isolate the data of individuals, it is therefore inevitable that huge tranches of personal data from innocent people would have been held by the authorities in the USA.
The European Data Protection Supervisor and several national Data Protection Authorities have repeatedly published detail analyses showing that the agreement is very privacy intrusive.
The EU Commission and many in the Parliament that were in favour of the deal (including Fine Gael MEPs) argued that we should trust the US agencies. This is an incredible position considering following September 11th the US secret services accessed these records without even informing the EU or any national authorities. This clearly broke EU law and the law of several EU states. This was exposed in the New York Times, which was then denounced by the US government, implying that they were assisting terrorists.
The Socialist Party opposes any erosion of civil liberties. Often states will use the cover of ‘anti terrorist’ or ‘emergency’ measures as a cover to attack civil liberties. This can then be used against any future democratic opposition movements including the workers’ movement. There have been many examples of this through history, more recently we saw this with mass arrests of innocent protesters in Copenhagen during the climate change summit. In this case the police used so called ‘preventative arrests’, a power that was given to them under ‘emergency’ legislation.
The EU Commission, the EU governments and the Obama administration will now try to put another SWIFT deal together that would appease some of the right wing in the Parliament that voted against the deal this time. Another course of action is for the US to do bilateral deals with individual member states. Either way such a deal would inevitably undermine civil liberties and needs to be vigoursely opposed. Should a ‘SWIFT 2′ be presented to the European Parliament Joe Higgins will vote against it.
More Photos Here
Read Joe’s press release here
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