Strasbourg, 04/07/2006 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday, several MEPs cast doubt upon the attitude of the European Commission which had hitherto not stated it was competent regarding the transfer of financial information from Swift to the US secret services. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Co-President of the Greens/ELA, felt that, as guardian of the treaties, the Commission should envisage an inquiry, saying the Commission is not being consistent with the role entrusted to it. He said it was incredible that the EU, which defines itself as a union that defends values, should let itself be dragged into an illegal situation and allow itself to be convinced, without any legal base, that it should give information to a third country. He went on to say the Parliament should adopt a more aggressive stance and regretted that the Commission and the Council do not have the courage to face up to the United States over this issue. In his view, Swift did not have the right to forward data as the 1995 directive bans all data transfer of any kind. One must therefore discover who is responsible. The Commission had said end June that the company Swift had not violated European law on data protection (EUROPE 9219). On this point, the president of the GUE/NGL group, Francis Wurtz, said the situation would be still “worse” if it appeared that the data transfer had been done legally. Regarding the fact that the European Central Bank had been informed of the secret agreement between the US Treasury and the company Swift, Mr Wurtz said it is an avowal of “laissez-faire” showing us the dark, hidden side of the central bank's independence. Silvana Koch-Mehrin (ALDE, Germany) expressed “alarm” at the series of violations of data protection. In her view, a decision-framework is needed on data protection in the third pillar, in order to have better democratic control of the issue. A resolution will be voted in plenary on Wednesday.