Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-07-03-Speech-1-102"
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"en.20060703.16.1-102"2
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"Mr President, I have exercised the right to sit nearer the front so that you do not have to keep looking up to the back rows, and it might make the debates in this House more lively if we moved closer together. After all, we want to ensure that we engage in proper parliamentary deliberation.
For precisely this reason, I personally would have inserted a sunset clause – irrespective of the fact that this is an international instrument – so that we could check after five years whether the whole system had achieved anything, whether it had proved useful or whether we had created unnecessary legislation, for that cannot be our function as a parliament.
If I call in a painter, I want him to paint the wall properly when he comes. I do not want him to come back twice more to paint some of the bits he has missed. The public have exactly the same expectation of our legislative activity. In this respect, I would like to see the sunset clause stay in place – and I am aware that there has been an agreement on committee procedure – so that we in Parliament have an obligation to review what we are actually doing. Nevertheless, I shall hold discussions with my colleagues from the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats and the Socialist Group in the European Parliament to determine our general approach to the subject of SWIFT in the context of transfers of funds.
At the end of the day, however, my thanks go to the Commission for cooperating in a spirit of mutual trust, and I would ask whether it might also exert some influence on the European Central Bank to encourage it to cooperate in the same spirit as the Commission itself.
I do not think I need dwell any longer on this technical point. Commissioner McCreevy explained very well what is essentially at stake here. He pointed out that we have an international obligation to fulfil Special Recommendation VII of the Financial Action Task Force. He has dealt with the technical details, and for that reason I need hardly reiterate these.
As he quite rightly said, we have achieved a balanced and reasonable compromise with the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs in collaboration with the Commission and the Council, a compromise which, as I see it and in the view of my committee, takes full account of the interests of data protection and data security as well as meeting the concerns of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs. Nevertheless, in the case of such reports, even those that come from international bodies, we should ask ourselves far more frequently whether they actually achieve anything.
As this document has been on the table since last year and its existence has been common knowledge since some time around November 2005, I took the liberty of taking it with me on a trip to Israel, where I had talks with an expert at a university who specialises in the study of countermeasures to freeze the flow of funds to terrorists. He used to be an agent and a lieutenant in the Israeli armed forces and had worked for Mossad. He looked at this document and, to be perfectly honest, did not really see the value of it. I can quite understand his reaction.
My own background is as follows: I have worked in a bank, and I have studied law. I know that terrorist funding does not involve Terrorist A going into a high street bank, depositing his money and hoping that someone will draw it from a bank based in Damascus. There are completely different ways of channelling funds to terrorists. We are perhaps closing a window of opportunity, and we shall no doubt catch some small fry as a result – so much seems certain – but it is not the proper sharp instrument we need to combat terrorism. I am honestly convinced of that.
I naturally believe it is right and reasonable to try to curb and dry up the flow of funding to terrorists. That is an absolute must. There might be other ways to achieve that goal. The fact is, however, that instead of standing here I would probably be going up to receive the Nobel Prize if I knew exactly how to do it. Things being as they are, I believe we have at least a good starting point here.
For all that, we have engaged in lengthy discussions. We have spoken about this report with many different institutions, including the European Central Bank. With regard to our talks with the ECB, it was hugely disappointing to learn from the press that the ECB had long been aware of the system for which we are now creating a legal basis and which has been publicised in the media and that the ECB knew what SWIFT was doing with the United States. I am not trying to link two issues here, but it is surely obvious that what we are doing here is rubber-stamping a
by creating a system after the event and putting it on a legal basis.
It would have been very helpful – and this is not addressed to the Commission, because the fault does not lie with it – if an institution like the ECB had said ‘We know that such things are happening, and we want to cooperate with you to develop a sound legal basis on which to create provisions that protect the fundamental rights of our population, particularly in relation to the United States’.
The United States is, of course, a transatlantic partner of ours. I would never question that, particularly as a German. Yet we are starting to think things over. It is not only the recent disclosure of events in connection with SWIFT. There was also the issue of storing aircraft passengers’ personal data, we suspected the existence of secret prisons, there were secret flights, and we had the discussion on data retention. These things are steadily escalating."@en1
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