EU-US cooperation in processing transactions used to finance terrorism produced positive results between 2016 and 2018, according to a Commission report published on Monday 22 July. Over this period, 70,991 'leads' were generated, some of which contributed to the opening of investigations into terrorist attacks on EU territory, notably in Stockholm, Barcelona and Turku, writes the Commission in a statement.
The Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP), which came into effect in 2010, aims to provide the US Treasury with Financial Messaging Data on European bank accounts through SWIFT. The US Treasury then analyses the transferred data.
This agreement had been controversial in the European Parliament, which had rejected it the first time. In approving it in 2010, it required that Europol be able to block transfers to the United States and verify that each request made by the US Treasury is justified in the context of the fight against terrorism and that the volume of data requested is as small as possible.
It is therefore these elements that this fifth report analyses. It is based on information provided by the US Treasury to a European questionnaire, as well as Member States' impressions of the reciprocity of the agreement. On these bases, the Commission states that it is satisfied with the functioning of the programme and its safeguards with regard to the proportionality of requests and controls, with data not extracted, "all deleted at the latest within 5 years".
But, the programme can be improved: the United States could better specify the geographical areas in the EU that appear to be the most sensitive during the analysis, which would allow requests to be better targeted. Member States could also communicate more regularly to Europol if their exchanges of information with the US Treasury on these famous data analyses have real added value. The next report will be prepared in 2021. Link to the report: https://bit.ly/2y57k4Z (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)