Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-03-12-Speech-3-181"
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"en.20030312.5.3-181"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, I am pleased that we have witnesses here today to hear us – their visit to the European Parliament will have served a useful purpose. All the citizens who are listening to us today are taxpayers and in the final analysis they are the ones who finance officials' salaries and some of them are following our debates with a certain sense of irony. And, Commissioner, it is the Commission's third-tier officials in particular who ought to be aware that they bear an enormous responsibility in Brussels, and that they also have to protect the interests of Europe's citizens.
It is already clear that we need to fight terrorism. I myself am each year the budget rapporteur of the Committee on Citizens' Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs, and we give Commissioner Vitorino everything he needs for the war on terror. None of us will refuse if the measures proposed are reasonable. Especially since 11 September we have been aware of the need for vigilance on our planet and the need to take appropriate measures at any given time. On the other hand – and I say this as someone from Germany – data protection is not just something that you can surrender if you consider it important that the European Union should not become like America. It is our task as Members, as representatives of the people, to take our electors' and our citizens' interests seriously and to defend them. We are not just talking about the airlines' interests here. We are talking about the interests of people who will soon find – without their knowing anything about it – that every detail of their lives has been handed over to the American security services, without ever having approved that and without knowing how this data will be used. Up to now they have always assumed that constitutional arrangements apply in the European Union and that data about them is sacrosanct.
What I would now like to know is this: how will we be able to convince these citizens in the future if the American authorities, who are giving no guarantees at all, are in a position to use or abuse their data as they wish?"@en1
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