Brussels, 12/02/2013 (Agence Europe) - Several American companies, such as Amazon and eBay, could have written European Parliament (EP) amendments to Commissioner Viviane Reding's reform of European data protection rules in January 2012. This is certainly what Privacy International, an association active in the area of data protection, is saying, and also the well-known Austrian student, Max Schrems, whose battle with Facebook has been well documented. Schrems, in fact, set to work on comparing the positions of both the Parliament and industry - in this case the positions of the biggest American companies which are unnerved by Reding's reforms and those of the MEPs from the internal market and consumer protection committee (IMCO) [the civil liberties committee - LIBE - which is competent on the issue has not yet published its amendments] - and he discovered “striking similarities” between the amendments proposed and the position papers of Amazon, eBay, the American Chamber for Commerce and even the European Banking Federation. In the view of Schrems and the NGO, dozens of amendments could simply have been copied and pasted. A website launched on 11 February - lobbyplag.eu - also gives an idea of the similarities in wording. And what is more, it seems that British MEPs are the most inclined to lift the amendments of the groups in question word for word.
“British MEPs seem particularly attached to plagiarising the suggestions of lobbyists”, writes Privacy International - MEPs like Malcolm Harbour, a member of the IMCO committee, who has apparently copied over 25% of his amendments directly from lobbyists. These amendments moreover result from different motivations, with the American Chamber of Commerce (which furthermore recently expressed its concern to Reding) thus trying, according to the website lobbyplag.eu, to influence and review downwards the level of penalties, and with others wanting to be assured that the new rules will not create an American-style system of class actions and will keep European consumers associations in check. For the European Banking Federation, the website confirms that it is apparently a question of reducing the independence of national data protection authorities.
While, in the view of the rapporteur for this issue, the young Jan-Philipp Albrecht MEP (Greens/EFA), the lobbying of these companies is indeed great, even “aggressive”, other sources close to the debate say that the problem does not essentially reside in the fact that the MEPs include these requests but rather in the fact that too few amendments emanate from consumers' associations or representatives of civil society. “The problem is not the lobbying in itself”, Albrecht points out - “the problem is that these amendments are currently mostly in favour of the industry”. In Albrecht's opinion, without the reactions of citizens and civil society organisations, there is even a risk today that the vote planned for April in the Parliament will for the most part reflect the voice of the big groups. “It is going to go very, very quickly, the lobbies know it but not the public at large and there are not enough debates at national level to raise their awareness”, Albrecht says. He fears that the public will discover only after the event and when it is too late because Parliament has approved a report below current data protection standards. The other risk is that the different committee votes lead to standards which are “below our current standards” when the Parliament has always fought for the highest standards possible (our translation throughout). The reform of the old 1995 rules is certainly raising a level of lobbying rarely seen until now, and it also unleashing much passion. In a speech given in Berlin on 4 February, an American diplomat from the foreign office did not mince his words when he spoke of a risk of trade war with the EU if Reding's proposals were accepted in their current state. He also pointed out that data protection did not necessarily have to be a right for Americans - a statement with which Reding obviously disagrees. (SP/transl.fl)