But on Thursday 11 February, he had to bring bad news to Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and the 25 other heads of EU member states, gathering in the European Council with -for the first time- Herman van Rompuy as their President. Buzek had to tell them that ‘his’ parliament had refused to give its consent to the agreement on banking data transfers to the US via the SWIFT network.
The 27 EU member states of the Council and the European Commission negotiated the deal with the United States. But since recently the Lisbon Treaty came in force, the European Parliament has the right to reject such an agreement. By doing this, the EP resisted pressure from the national governments and the US Administration. (Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, called Buzek the night before the vote!) The resolution rejecting the agreement was approved by 378 votes to 196, with 31 abstentions. Liberal and socialist MEP’s were in favour of the resolution; Christian-Democrats tried to safe the agreement.
MEP Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the Parliament’s rapporteur on the Swift Agreement, commented that: ‘If the US administration would propose to the US Congress something equivalent to this – to transfer in bulk all bank-data of American citizens to a foreign power- we know what they would say!’.
Guy Verhofstadt (Leader of the liberal group ALDE) signalled the significance of this vote for the Parliament: "This is an important day for the European Parliament. We rejected an agreement that does not meet European standards on protection of data privacy. Our goal is now to achieve a better, long-term agreement to balance security and fundamental rights of our citizens."
Hennis-Plasschaert added: "This house cannot keep falling for vague promises. The proposed interim-agreement is simply a bad deal. The rule of law is important and currently our laws are being broken and under this agreement they would continue to be broken. Parliament should not be complicit in this."
The EP recognised that financial data are crucial in tracking terrorist activities but it took also the matter of data protection law as well as for example the principle of reciprocity extremely seriously. After rejecting the interim agreement, the European Commission has to prepare the negotiating mandate for a definitive agreement, involving Council and Parliament on an equal footing!
