Brussels, 12/07/2010 (Agence Europe) - US Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano vigorously rejected any thought of amending the EU-US agreement on the transfer of air passenger data (Passenger Name Records - PNR) as part of the fight against terrorism. She said at a conference organised by the Atlantic Council reflection group in Washington on Thursday 8 July that the call from the European Parliament (EP) to amend the agreement is, “quite frankly, unrealistic”. Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding was present to hear her comments.
PNR. The agreement signed in 2007 is still awaiting ratification by MEPs so that it can come permanently into force and MEPs, with their power of veto, want the agreement to be amended. Napolitano, however, sharply rejected the EP's “unrealistic” calls for restrictions on data mining and watch-list matching. She came out most strongly against re-opening negotiations, opining that an agreement which is working well should not be changed. Reding warned that the current provisional agreement, which allows the US to retain the data for 15 years was not supported by the EP, which was nervous about this issue. “If Parliament voted now, it would be a negative vote. 15 years is too long,” she stated. Relaying the wide-ranging debate in Europe on data retention and rulings by constitutional courts on the issue, she suggested that a “reasonable” solution to the matter had to be found.
Data protection. Discussions also took place on forthcoming talks on a transatlantic agreement on data protection. “We would like an agreement which frames all the other agreements” on data transfer for law enforcement purposes, without replacing the sectoral agreements such as the PNR and Swift Agreements, Reding said, indicating she was “optimistic” about reaching a framework agreement by the end of 2011. Negotiations are due to begin in October. Napolitano said that the EU and the US were “already there quarters of the way” towards the agreement since 12 common principles had already been reached in preparatory work. Napolitano said that amendment of the Privacy Act - the sensitive point in the negotiations - would be “very difficult to put into a framework type of agreement”, and that alternatives could be found. Reding stated that she wanted European citizens to have the same rights of redress in the US as American citizens in Europe, but that it remained nevertheless up to the US to determine how to achieve this. (B.C./transl.rt)