Brussels, 22/02/2007 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday, the EU approved the negotiating mandate with a view to reaching an agreement with the United States on the transfer of Passenger Name Records (PNR), as part of the fight against terrorism. The Employment and Social Affairs Council endorsed, without discussion, the draft negotiating mandate, the exact detail of which will remain secret given its sensitive nature. A meeting will be held in Washington next week between the German presidency, assisted by the Commission, and the US authorities, a European source revealed, describing this first meeting as “exploratory”. The aim is to find a new agreement before July to replace the first text annulled by the European Court of Justice (see EUROPE 9281). At the end of January, German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, speaking in Berlin, said they were confident of reaching a new agreement within the allotted timescale and one which would strike a balance between protection of privacy and the effectiveness of the fight against terrorism. The disagreement over how these data could be used remains, however. Under the terms of the agreement concluded in October 2006, passenger data for those travelling to the United States from Europe are collected by the US Customs and Border Protection Department (CBP), but the US Homeland Security department can, under certain conditions, share them with US agencies, such as the FBI, involved in the fight against terror. Addressing the European Parliament at the start of February, German Deputy Foreign Minister Günter Glosser said that “the United States are not interested in improving data protection” and that, on the contrary, Europe had to “work from the hypothesis that they will back-pedal” (EUROPE 9357). The current interim agreement provides for automatic transfer to US agencies of 34 types of personal data (passenger's address, telephone number, credit card number etc.). Internal Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini has said he would call for the amount of data transferred to the US authorities to be reduced, opining that there were 19, not 34, useful pieces of data. These data are held for three and a half years, but the Americans would like to be able to retain them “for as long as necessary”, the US negotiator Stewart Baker said at the end of last year (see EUROPE 9288). The European side is unhappy with extending the length of time data can be held. The forthcoming negotiations are generating great concern in the European Parliament, which recently adopted a resolution in which MEPs advanced a number of principles to provide a high level of protection for data on European citizens (see EUROPE 9368) (bc)