Brussels, 18/03/2004 (Agence Europe) - The European Parliament's Committee on Citizens' Freedoms and Rights is threatening to take action before the Court of Justice if the European Commission confirms the agreement on indexing trans-Atlantic air passengers, concluded last December with US authorities.
In a draft resolution to be presented in plenary end March, MEPs consider that the Commission would be going beyond its "powers of implementation" if it effectively adopted the decision, which considers that the commitments taken by Washington in December are adequate compared to the directive on protecting data of a personal nature. MEPs consider among other things that the effective range of data to be transferred is "rather confused", that the amount of time such data can be stored is "unreasonable" and that US provisions on respect of private life do not protect European nationals. Above all, they consider that, as there is no legal base in American law, the commitments will not be of a binding nature. MEPs therefore call on the Commission to withdraw the proposal of decision and to negotiate a real, binding international agreement with the United States. The EP reserves itself the right to refer the matter to the Court if the controversial decision is adopted.
The draft resolution presented by Johanna Boogerd-Quaak (ELDR, NL) was adopted on Thursday by a very large majority of 25 to 9 by the Committee on Citizens' Freedoms. MEPs were obviously not convinced by what Stewart Verdery, US Assistant Secretary for Transport and Border Security, had to say during his hearing by the committee on Wednesday. The "agreement will improve the current situation", Stewart Verdery insisted, commenting that the alternative solution would be to continue with the current system. We recall that, according to a provisional agreement concluded with the Commission, the US authorities have since March used data from the files of European airline companies without restriction. If airline companies refuse, they are liable to fines of $6,000 per passenger or a ban on the use of US airports. In the context of the December agreement, Stewart Verdery recalled, the US Bureau for Border Security undertook to restrict the use of data to the fight against terrorism and international crime and to restrict the number of bodies having electronic access to data. The "sensitive" data on the religion or state of health of passengers will, in principle, be filtered and removed.
MEPs' doubts about the storage period for data were confirmed by the explanations of the American representative. "After three and a half years, the PNR (Passenger Name Record) data that has been manually accessed during that period of time will be destroyed, with the remainder stored off-line only for audit purpose for an additional eight years. Only PNR data that is linked to a specific enforcement record will be routinely accessibly beyond three and a half years", he said.
Steward Verdery also tried to convince MEPs that the rights of European citizens will be guaranteed by the three legal instruments existing in the United States: - the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Privacy Act and the E-Government Act. Also, he insisted, the government has appointed within the internal security department an official responsible for protection of privacy, Nuala O'Connor Kelly.
These arguments did not convince the rapporteur, who notes in her resolution that these instruments give only American citizens the right to access and rectify data held by the Federal authorities. Several participants evoked during the hearing concrete cases where errors have not been rectified, such as the case, cited by Elena Paciotti (Democratici di sinistra, Italy), of an Italian citizen turned back from the United States where he was studying at university because, as a son of a diplomat, he was born in Saudi Arabia.
During the exchange that confirmed the dialogue of the deaf between US authorities and the European Parliament, Stewart Verderey simply explained that he would be very surprised if such cases were linked to the processing of PNR data but he was willing to look at them. The processing of data is carried out by true professionals who follow the instructions set and do not have time to rummage about in the dossiers, he explained. Mr Verdery did not formally say he was against the establishment of a "push" system which would allow data to be filtered before being sent on to US authorities, rather than giving free access to airline company files as at present. There would, however, also have to be a structure to make such a system work, he commented.